Week of 12/10

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.