Week of 10/29

Happy November!

This week we celebrated Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos, and while we were rained out of our Oxbow Farm field trip, we still investigated quite a bit.

Pumpkins were a topic of exploration this week: we read stories about pumpkins, learned pumpkin songs, measured and weighed pumpkins (and learned what “circumference” means), tested how well different pumpkins rolled, estimated the number of seeds in a pumpkin, and – of course – we cut some pumpkins open. This one theme extended to areas of literacy, math, science, and problem solving.

In literacy, we also did our weekly word work (phonics), practiced verbal storytelling, and learned more about the process of brainstorming for stories. The words we build this week followed the pattern of ending in 
--ug and --un as well as words that end in the phoneme --ng.

Students also explored various letters and sounds centers, including a center for creating letters out of pretzel dough (which were later baked and eaten, of course!) and names out of blocks. 

Our math time continued with pattern work, estimation, and also collecting data and then organizing it in a manner that could then be analyzed (asking how many students do like bubble gum and then working on a making a chart of this information).

Family Group time continues with projects based on our theme of The Farm. It’s exciting to see the kids forge forward with their research, discovering answers to their questions, and then figuring out how to share that information with others. Over the course of research, many groups have begun asking new questions as they spring up, and then investigating the answers to those.

The national news of Hurricane Sandy, as well as our rained-out farm trip, brought up the question of floods in our group: how floods occur, what happens during a flood, what the aftermath of a flood looks like. Hearing students as young as five and six years old discuss current events and ask questions about those events was amazing, and this discussion brought up even more cross-curricular connections.

One very important process we went through this week was the process of coming up with classroom agreements and then deciding on the consequences that occur when those agreements are broken. We had large group conversations, small group brainstorming, and we modeled proper and improper behavior in the classroom. This information is posted in all of our classrooms, and a great at-home follow up would be to engage your child in a conversation about the agreements, and what they mean to our school community.