Sharing Our Work

We have been trying to limit the number of indoor school celebrations as Covid numbers surge in our area. Instead of bringing in our family and friend community for publishing parties, we have been finding ways to recognize our writers during the school day. Theresa's writers shared their "I Am" poems during our morning meeting to enthusiastic applause. Some of the younger kids were motivated by them to write some of their own poems. Tracy's writers shared their hats inspired by Jan Brett. Instead of having a science symposium, each child is going to film a short clip talking about their experiment, and we will share links to these with our community. It's not quite the same as having everyone together, but it feels like a safer option for now.

Besides finding our audience for our work, we are actually sharing the work of doing all the science experiments. This week we tested two recipes for glow-in-the-dark slime to see which one glowed brighter. Ask your child what we found in our careful bathroom observations (the only room with no windows!). There were 8 batches made, and the children noticed that even though we were all following the same procedure, the end results were not exactly the same. It gave us a great opportunity to talk about whether or not results are reproducible and why those variations might occur. Children also helped to gather sticks for two experiments on starting fires. They did some careful animal observations and came to the conclusion that for most animals being at school is a little too distracting for good scientific data collection. Watching them all watch a bunny for 10 minutes in complete silence (to help the bunny feel safe and not hurt his ears) was truly magical.

A different workload sharing happened this weekend on our winter workday. We have four of these throughout the year, and this one was focused on doing some deep cleaning and organizing inside the school. Everyone spread out inside the school and jumped right in. We cleared out three big trash bags of recycling, found some things to throw out and some things to move on, and helped to create some organizational systems that will hopefully make it easier for everyone to keep our materials organized. It's a gift for both our teachers and students.