It’s almost time for our winter break! This week has been a
busy one as usual, and it seems like most everyone is ready for a bit of
relaxation before moving forward. This was a week to wrap up projects, pieces
of work, and other tasks that the kids have been working on.
On Monday, we had a special visitor come speak to us.
Teacher Nettie was back in the U.S. to visit family, but while she was here,
she told us all about the elementary school that she founded in Tanzania, where
she now lives. She showed dozens of striking photographs of African schools and
children, and told the kids stories about how children live there. The
comparison was fascinating, and is a great conversation starter for your kids.
During our morning literacy centers, students have been
working with adults playing a variety of phonics game, across levels. We have a
growing collection of card and board games that help kids practice basic letter
recognition and sounds, sight words, long vowels, short vowels, consonant
blends, and more. These games have been a popular choice this week, and are a
fantastic way to reinforce learning.
Teacher Christie has been using the word game Bananagrams
with students to build words, and thanks to our newfound internet access, the
kids also have a choice of computer time. We’ve just begun this choice, and
right now we’re mainly using the website Starfall, which is a wonderful reading
resource.
The beginning readers and writers also presented their pet
rock owner manuals, along with their pet rocks. They’ve worked so hard on these
books, and it was wonderful to see them show pride in their product.
Nouns, verbs, and adjectives have been a recurring focus,
and writing with descriptive language was a topic this week. The beginning readers
read the book “Gingerbread Baby” and then decorated their own gingerbread
people based on descriptive sentences that they wrote.
During math time, we are continuing to look closely at place
value, and we are using the vocabulary to reinforce the concept: the ones
place, the tens place, the hundreds place. We also have spent some time
studying odd and even numbers and discussing what makes an odd or an even
number. This is a great opportunity to look for patterns in even or odd
numbers!
Our big family group project this week was to make “stepping
stones.” We began by setting up a class
store where students were able to “buy” various gems, tiles, and other
treasures for their individual stepping stone. For younger learners, they were
asked to choose 20 items. Another group were given $1.00 in change and told
that each item cost 5 cents each. They then shopped the store, spending pennies
and nickels, and swapping out dimes and quarters for smaller change. After
winter break, the concept of money will be more of a focus for the beginning
math learners.
The kids then designed their stepping stone by setting up
their treasures and copying onto a sheet of paper. The next day, we all had fun
working with the cement to create artistic stepping stones.