Inspiration

This past week we headed to Proctor's to see the Mermaid Theater of Nova Scotia's "Rainbow Fish" performance. The kids were excited to see the story on the stage especially after we made our own "Rainbow Fish" at school - a project where each child had made one special scale to create a beautiful and colorful whole. We had a number of conversations about teamwork. If we make a group art project, who gets to take it home, or do we keep it as one big piece? How do two puppeteers and one stage manager make a whole ocean of fish and other creatures come to life? While "raptor" play definitely continued during free play times, both fish and puppet play joined the mix. Taking some extra time with this story helped to inspire both art, play, and conversations about careers in the arts.

Rose's PK and K Class

• Created monsters by rolling dice and drawing body parts according to the number rolled.

• Used clothes pins to pick up pom poms to complete a color pattern.

• One student created a rubber band shooter with classroom materials and gave lessons to the other students. The next day, we all used clothes pins, popsicle sticks and rulers to engineer our own rubber band shooters and other inventions. 

• Our "chickadee chickadee eagle" game has evolved again. Now some students pretend to be "eggs" in the nest that hatch into baby birds when tagged.

• We decorated eggs with tissue paper and glue, and used dot stickers to match alphabet letters on other eggs.

• In mini-courses, we made oobleck and played with proportions to make thicker or thinner slime.

Tracy's 1st - 4th Class

In math, we delved into fractions, particularly comparing different fractions and finding equivalent fractions. Our second-grade class is forming the basis for multiplication, using square tiles to solve area problems for rectangles. Our third-grade class is working on hard to locate fractions on a number line and make connections between this and measuring objects in real life. The fourth graders were working on some complicated number stories all week: multiplying fractions, doing division, and trying to remember to underline the important bits to help make sure we do the right things (something even their teacher can struggle with when we don't slow down and read carefully)!

In writing, we edited our fiction pieces. There were discussions about how to keep things interesting, what makes a story funny, and how to use quotation marks and paragraphs correctly. We talked about different ways to show time passing and how much we need to give our reader explicitly versus implicitly. Everyone was excited to share their pieces at our publishing party Friday morning.

In reading, the kids continue to build their knowledge of words. This week we were looking at homophones and words with multiple meanings. We also talked about parts of speech.