Art

I love art! Every day we dance and sing. Our art shelves are constantly in an ebb and flow as kids pull what they want for a project from its space. For May we are delving into the world of visual art. This week we explored abstract geometric art using pastels and paint. We also discovered the fascinating artist Yayoi Kusama. We read the book "Yayoi Kusama Covered Everything in Dots and Wasn't Sorry" and looked at examples of her art, including giant dot covered pumpkins!

Rose and Norine’s PK and K Class

• Did a second round of cloud painting. After seeing the results from last week, they wanted to try again and make their clouds puffier.

• Played “Guess What’s Missing” from an ever-growing collection of objects.

• Played “What Else Could This Be?”

• Read and danced to the “Jamberry” song – an instant class favorite.

• Made letter books for “J, L, M, and N.”

• Made Kites, then decorated them with sticKers and chalK for the letter “K.”

• Made Lions on sticks and played with them. Sang “I’m a Lion, Hear Me Roar.”

• Created Masks.

• Practiced counting and matching numbers.

• Made paper apples and practiced weaving a foam worm through the slots in the apple.

• Read “Round Trip” and practiced putting sequence cards in order to tell a story correctly.

• Practiced putting the numbers 1 – 10 in counting order.

• Made 6 play dough snakes and practiced making the number 6.

Tracy’s 1st – 4th Grade Class

In math, our first graders continue to work on developing their understanding of place value: playing games and doing activities that involve separating numbers into tens and ones, turning 10-ones into a ten, and turning 10-tens into a hundred. Our second-grade class is experimenting with some different strategies for double digit subtraction and making a given amount of money in more than one way (practicing adding coins and dollars). The third-grade class continues to work on breaking apart multiplication problems, solving word problems with division and multiplication, fractions, and area and perimeter. The fourth graders experimented with and created different quilting patters with different numbers of symmetry. They practiced line plots and measuring to the nearest 1/8 inch.

In literacy, we worked to finish up a letter (to a friend, family member, favorite author, etc). We talked about general letter conventions like the date, greeting, body of the letter, and closing. It was a great chance to keep on working on our grammar, knowing when to start a new paragraph, and recognizing when we are being repetitive. In reading, our youngest readers read “Danny and the Dinosaur,” “Not Now Said the Cow,” and “Arthur’s Reading Race.” The “Joyful Noise” group practiced and performed 2 of their favorite poems for the whole school. The “My Side of the Mountain” group finished the book, talked about the ending (consensus: SAD!), and made a plan to look for wild edibles in our fields and forest.