Week of 10/15

Before talking about what we did this week, there are a couple of announcements for next week:

Thursday, 10/25 is our Community Open House at The Bridge School. In preparation for this event, our school is going to  press cider on Wednesday. If you happen to have a surplus of apples, or even just one or two, please drop them off to the basket we will have handy. Thank you!

This past week, the younger students continued their work on patterns during our Investigations time. We predicted how the beginnings of patterns would continue, we recorded patterns that we made with linking cubes, and we observed the different parts of a given pattern – the repeating parts.

The first grade students have also continued their more in-depth pattern exploration, as well as work on the “Count to 1000 club.” They are using base 10 blocks to build upon their numbers, and the scrolls of numbers they are creating are quite impressive.  

In Language Arts, the first grade students have begun to work on more focused literacy-based projects during their centers time. Some of the projects include: responding about challenging books to read, creating written missions for a treasure hunt, building a paper dollhouse to act as the foundation for stories, and creating their own Mad Libs story. We worked on our phonics sounds by building words from word families. One group looked at words ending in “-en” and “-et” while another group looked at words containing the digraph “-sh.” We also have been working on the sight words “they,” “all,” “like,” and “know.” On Thursday, we brainstormed and wrote sentences beginning with “I like.” Another ongoing focus is on parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

The Kindergarten students have been busy exploring their literacy centers, which include forming letters with clay, building letters with blocks, writing their own mini-books, and practicing writing their letters in shaving cream. Songs are a large part of learning their letters and letter sounds. Another focus has been on the format of a book; for example, what the cover is and its purpose, what the title is, where the name of the author is written.

Our multi-age family groups are continuing to sift through the topic of “The Farm.” This week, we looked at the long list of farm-related questions that arose, and divided these questions into categories – bugs, vegetables, flowers, vehicles, seeds, infrastructure, etc. Then, each student chose which category was most interesting to him or her. Our next steps will be to figure out how to answer the questions we’ve come up with, then after that, go out and work on answering them.

One method of answering these answers is to ask an expert (something the kids decided was a valid path), and this week, we welcomed an expert into the classroom to talk about how chickens lay eggs. This was one student-generated question, and our resident chicken expert, Melissa Bookwalter, brought in her Buff Orpington, Gloria, to help explain more about chickens.

Other subjects that we worked on this week were Pea Patch, where we made and observed terrariums; Explorers outdoor education; Spanish, where we just finished our unit on El Cuerpo (or, the body); art; music; Physical Education; Studio Thinking with Teacher Maura.

Here are some games and ideas for connecting school to home:

-Mad Libs are a great way to continue learning about nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We will be doing a round of Halloween Mad Libs this coming week, but the more the better.

-Go on a noun scavenger hunt. Write down all of the nouns that you can find in a given room in your house (the list might get pretty long, though!). You can also add some adjectives to the nouns you have found to describe what they look, sound, taste, or feel like.

-Apple picking with the family is really fun, but it’s also a great conversation starter about the various varieties of apples, how apple trees grow, what can be made with apples. It’s also a good segue into our cider pressing this week.

-Have a calendar in your home that is visible to your child. You can talk about the day of the week, what the date is, count down to upcoming events, or even just mention that it’s still the season of autumn.

Have a wonderful weekend!