Happy Friday!
What an amazing week! I hope you all enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed living it!
This week, our friends visited the last class on our lower-yard playground to discuss our Class Council Agenda item of friends climbing on the playhouses. The friends from Jennifer's kindergarten class, the Thoughtful Careful Listeners, gave feedback about what parts of the sign was clear, what details could be added, as well as some alternate suggestions of different signs to put around the play ground. We appreciate all of the classes support in making these agreements.
In Gardening, the students began with reading the Non-Fiction book, Seeds. They shared out ideas and connected their gardening experiences to their science lesson.
It has been 2 weeks since they have visited the edible garden. They headed to the 4 beds to measure, investigate and troubleshoot. The First bed is kale and lettuce. They saw that the kale had grown 3 x its size when they first planted and the leaf lettuce has spread out. They determine that it will be harvest time next week. They investigate the broccoli and cauliflower beds next. They are starting to form heads and and are filling our bed as they grow larger. They also noticed that a caterpillar munched on one leaf, aphids were on another and the squirrels are eating leaves at the edge of the beds where they can reach. Our final beds are also changing. They have started to see seed sprouts in our seeded roots bed.
Students discussed what the first sprouts are and made comparisons to their seed book.
The class is always finding new teams in words! Our list is continuing to grow as students recognize these teams in different parts of our daily lives, whether it be in our Morning Message, Songs and Poems, our own writing, or in books they are reading! It's been intriguing to friends when they find new teams that make similar sounds or even multiple sounds. For example, -ou can sometimes say, ooo, ohhh, or ow! The English language is so tricky!
Students have gotten a lot of practice in asking Open-Ended questions to gain as much information as possible about the world around them. We have started to practice asking closed-ended questions, where the responses could be a simple yes or no. Each friend has been working on their own t-chart to help them collect data as they survey their friends on any closed-ended question they wish. After checking to see if they have surveyed all of the friends in the class, their next step will be to graph their results!
Friends have found different areas in the classroom to check how to spell their friends' names as well as to check who they have not surveyed yet!
We have also been finding different ways to organize ourselves! I posed a challenge for the class to get themselves into an alphabetically ordered line. They recognized that some friends names started with the same first letter and had to find out who would go first, as well as remembering the fact that we did not have each letter in the alphabet represented in our class.
The next challenge was to order themselves based on height. Each friend took time to guess and check where their body would be in line relative to their peers.
Thank you to all of the families that helped our community by donating funds to revamp our planter boxes on the playground! Between the three classes on our yard, we raised $160, and with the help of the Innovations Academy Matching Funds, we raised a total of $320!! That will be sure to help buy the starting supplies to get the garden growing again!
Thank you to Nooshin for being our Family Reader this week!
We checked the calendar and noticed that on the 21st, winter will be here! Our Buddies joined us in our welcoming of the upcoming season by making snowflakes. Friends found that folding the paper multiple times not only created different shapes, but it also made it hard to cut. However, students found many different shapes that they could make and that each snowflake was unique and and exciting!
I really appreciate the different shares that friends have brought in to give us more information about the fun learning that happens and home that can transfer into our classroom! We have a friend who enjoys a vegan lifestyle at home with her family and shared a very inspiring raw foods cookbook to give us a crash course! We discussed what was considered to be vegan and what was not and how it's okay to have a different diet than others.
Another friend shared how he practices arithmetic at home using an abacus. He demonstrated how to count by twos, fives, and tens using the counters, as well as how to do simple addition. Friends called out different equations for him to check the response on the abacus with!
Our friends are continuing to move forward with their world map, adding color to it!
We have been counting each day that we have been at school and the friends frequently check how many more days will we need to go to school for us to reach a new ten bundle, as well as calculating how many more ten bundles we would need to reach 100 days of school!
For this week's cooking class, we had a Blind Taste Test. The students discussed the five senses that we share and what their jobs are. We checked each of our senses as well as took some away, one at a time (closing our eyes, covering our ears, pinching our nose) to see what reactions we had. Check out our Discussion Notes Binder for more information.
We then moved into the food handling portion of the day. We reviewed fractions and how we can divide whole fruits into different parts. How many different parts can you get when you cut your apple?
We then moved into Blind Taste Test/Journal Switch! Half of the class worked with a blindfolded partner to check their ability to distinguish between the two fruits without sight or smell. Some friends were surprised by their results! The other half of the class worked in their journals and reflected on which sense they felt was the most important and why. Come check out their journals when you can!
It's a new month, which means new Songs and Poems!
This month, I introduced American and Japanese Haiku's. This allowed us to explore the special syllable patterns that make haiku's unique. We discussed the differences between the number of letters versus the number of syllables in words. We checked this by looking at our names. Each friend got a chance to check how many syllables are in their own special name. How many are in yours?
Another friend brought in special artifacts from home to tell about her aunt that was once a nurse in India. The exciting thing about this discussion was that the presenter did not have all of the answers to our questions regarding these items, which means we were able to come up with many of our own theories and it gives us the space to do more research on the topic. This also made our class think about what information we need to have ready before we share something with the group?
Just a quick reminder that we have new Volunteer Sign Ups available in class. I am so excited to see new names listed!! Please do come in to find a date that works for you!
Hope you have a great weekend!
Love, Gaby
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