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. 

Week of 12/3

 We had a great week, especially on our mid-week trip to The Seattle Children’s Theater to see The Wizard of Oz. They put on a great show, and we had a really good time discussing the play – as well as the books – in class, as well as doing some fun themed activities: we painted bricks on the yellow brick road, we created stories about the characters, and we compared various versions of the story that we have in class.

During literacy, the kids have been hard at work creating their “Pet Rock Owner Manuals.” In order to write the manual, we had to discuss all of the important things to know about taking care of a pet rock, like where it sleeps and what it eats, as well as the conventions of a “How-to” book. Many of the kids included a table of contents and relevant chapters, as well. 

Writing “How-to” guides will be something that we will continue to work on. In the future, we will look at how to write instructions and how to follow sequence in giving these instructions so that if another person were to follow the guide, the end result would be the same. This can be something you start to do at home, as well: asking your child to explain the steps in making a sandwich, or in getting ready for school.

Other learning centers that we had this week were an exploration of sugar and salt crystals, with students given the chance to create their own crystal structures out of clay; weighing and measuring various rocks; and reading alone or with a partner.

During the afternoon family group time, one group categorized minerals by various characteristics: color, shape, smell, texture. Another group formed hypotheses about what rocks might or might be able to do, and then tested these. Can rocks float? Can rocks write on paper?   

Week of 11/24

Welcome back from our long holiday weekend!

Us teachers have been adjusting our morning schedule a bit, and we seem to have found a good stride for the morning time: the first chunk of our morning block will include centers that stretch beyond literacy, into math, science, social studies, and beyond. As we start our next topic of “Rocks and Bones,” our learning centers revolved around rocks. All week, the centers stayed the same, so students had the opportunity to really dive into each of the centers, while also taking time for small-group work with Christie or Andrea.

At one center, students wrote stories from the point of view of a rock. Another center included a pile of books and the task of finding different information about rocks. A rock “guessing game” was another center, with students trying to figure out rock-and-mineral-related riddles, and then, of course, create their own. And a fourth learning center took place in the block area, as students built structures, then drew what they had created, then repeated the process backwards.

Our reading word work introduced sight words “why,” “when,” “where,” and “said.” These are very common words in print and speech, and constant practice will help kids become fluent in these sometimes-tricky words. We also looked at words ending in “ill,” as well as other words with the “wh” consonant blend. Soon, we’re hoping to create a consonant blend (or “digraph”) chart for the classroom.

During math time, the first graders are beginning to look more closely at the concept of place value. This is a hugely important topic, and one that will be a focus for months to come. Having a printed-out 100s chart at home is a great way to support the work we’ve done this week, looking at patterns in the numbers and exploring questions like “if 12 and 21 have the same numbers in them, how are they not the same number?” and “what is a digit?”

Our afternoon family group time was spent finished up our farm topic from the previous weeks, as well as looking ahead to our new topic. We reflected upon our work, our groups, and what we liked or did not like about our previous project time. And, we brainstormed some ideas of future themes we might want to explore. Hopefully, even more ideas will come up over the next few weeks. Our Burke Box (a classroom resource from the Burke Museum in Seattle) arrived, full of rocks and minerals for us to look at, so we began to explore its contents, while also thinking about what we already know about rocks.

Several questions have already come up, and some experiments, too! While we spent a chunk of time exploring the rocks, several kids wanted to know what happens if you put certain rocks in water – will they just get wet? Disintegrate? Melt? A great deal of scientific conversation followed. Other students have expressed interest in sparkly rocks and crystals, and geodes seem to be a fascinating favorite, which will be great to look more closely at.

Also, another field trip is upon us! We will be going rock collecting at Saltwater State Park on Monday afternoon. There, we will hold an Explorers outing, as well as have exploration time. One specific activity will be to find and collect some extra special rocks for our “pet rock” project for next week.

Our trip to see Wizard of Oz is next Wednesday, and we also have a parent meeting this coming Tuesday night. See you all soon!