Community

"Tell me about what you did here." The adults of our community came through for our science symposium this week. Not every family can make it to school at 8:30 am on a Wednesday, but I'm not sure that our scientists were particularly bothered. They had lots of interested adults asking them questions, allowing themselves to be test subjects, and appreciating the work they had done. They had donuts. They were proud of the work they did pulling their projects together and sharing their conclusions. I was grateful for our school community, and the respect that they show our children.

Morgan's PK and K Class

*Worked with "alpha pops" (ice pops that click together to match upper- and lower-case letters). 

*Created different versions of snowflakes and other neat designs using pattern blocks. 

*Worked with Uno cards (1-9) and counting cubes to create the number on the Uno card. 

*Used geometric shapes to build different creations. There were a lot of conversations of what the children had made. "I made a lollipop." "I made a tiny weight to lift." "I made a snowflake."

*Many children explored the paints at the easel this week. They discussed what happens when they mix the colors on their paper, how some paint brush marks were thick while others were thin, and figured out how to share their paints. "I'm using this. Please wait." "Can I have a turn next?" "You need to ask nicely for more paint."

*Explored sand, dried oatmeal, slime, air dry clay, texture bin, water play, Kinetic sand, and snow.

*Worked with different blocks, stamps, Legos, and rulers to measure things around the school.

*Used the cars and city rug and dress-up clothes.

*Played dice games and worked in their writer notebooks. 

*Used bingo dabbers to find different letters. Filled in their names with line dashes.

*Started mini courses for February. 

*Learned about Groundhog Day through books, songs, poems and creating their own groundhog puppet!

*Worked with puzzle pieces that had numbers 1-20 on one side then a picture on the matching piece to put together a number line.

*Watched some of the bigger kids share their results from their science experiments.

*The children really enjoyed painting the snow with liquid watercolors. This was a science exploration that built on what we had been doing with water and color over the past few weeks. The children were eager to see what would happen, what works better light or darker colors, does ice work better than snow? 

Tracy's 1st - 4th Grade Class

In math our fourth-grade class has been working on adding fractions, decomposing fractions, and turning improper fractions into mixed numbers. Our third-grade class has been digging deeper into multiplication. Our second-grade class is doing more complicated addition and subtraction problems and translating word problems into number models and diagrams.

In writing, we spent some time talking about how we know information is reliable. The children had some great ideas about consulting experts (and what makes someone an expert), looking for information in multiple sources, and finding out who is providing the information (a university, not-f0r-profit, government department, etc.). The children are continuing their research on an animal or specific person.

The fourth graders are starting to pull together their ideas for the play about colonial America. We hope to finish it soon, so that everyone else can start to learn their parts.