Rolling with It

We have a daily schedule, and it helps to keep our days in order. But sometimes we need to change things up, and it's good practice for all of us in "rolling with it." This past week was a bit challenging - our heating system was acting up on Monday, there was some serious snow falling on Tuesday, and we were trying to finish conducting our experiments so that we could share the results at next week's Science Symposium. We did our best to let kids know what was happening and why, and they did an impressive job of handling the extra transitions. It's one of those important life skills that we try to nurture.

Morgan's PK and K Class

*Explored foam beads, oatmeal, coffee grounds. 

*Painted with watercolors and tempera paints.

*Worked with Kanier blocks and wooden blocks.

*Used oil pastels, markers and crayons to write in their notebooks about what they want to be when they grow up. Some conversations were, "Look at what I drew. I'm going to be a baby doctor. You can be one too." "I want to be a firefighter and stop bad guys."

*Worked with Legos, cone and catch a ball, and picked up pom-poms with clothes pins then put them in egg cartons that had numbers 1-12.

*Worked on counting games, practiced writing numbers in the sand (1-10), color by numbers, cutting activities. 

*Created a graph using snowflakes to reflect if they liked snow (Yes or No)

*Guessed how many mittens tall they were then measured each child with mittens.

*Took care of dolls with the doctor kit.

*Read some number and counting books. 

*Played a few rounds of ABC and number bingo. 

*Learned more winter songs and finger plays. 

Tracy's 1st - 4th Class

In math, we have been working with fractions. Our second grade math class has been working on money math - counting 1-dollar, 5-dollar, 10-dollar, and 20-dollar bills. They got to go on a $100 "shopping spree" and make change as they purchased each item. They are also working on collecting data, using tallies, picture graphs, and bar graphs. Our third grade class has been exploring equivalent fractions, comparing fractions, and representing fractions in different ways. The fourth graders were a bit daunted to learn a new way to do multidigit multiplication (having just started to get the hang of partial sums), but they found out they really liked the lattice method for both efficiency and keeping track of place value.

In literacy, we started a new research project. Each child is either studying an animal or a person. We set up outlines for both of these and talked about "the important" facts. We started to gather resources from the internet (and talked about reliable sources) as well as finding books to request from our library system. We have been working on r-controlled vowels: ar, er, ir, or, and ur - sorting words into groups, noticing them in our writing, and looking for them in our reading. Our reading groups are continuing on My Side of the Mountain, Frindle, and the Bob books.