Baby Spider Plants, Tool Boxes, and Wagons

This week the LE Students worked diligently to finish their second woodworking project of the year, a toolbox! Because children work at their own rates at Acera (see the article linked to Hiker Brain vs. Race Car Brain below) there were lots of options for children who had finished the project. Teams of students assisted our new student completing the toolbox as a group! Working on the project for the second time, student helpers were able to offer short cuts and assistance. Other children painted, created wood burning designs, and  finely sanded their crafts.

On Tuesday each child choose a clipping from the thriving spider pants on our windowsill, and placed them in a small glass jar. (We love glass jars if you would like to add to our collection please send them in!) They placed them throughout the room where they would make our classroom beautiful, and have the light to thrive. We have little plants in our dollhouse, on our work tables, and next to Taffy the Turtle’s tank! We will watch for roots to sprout over the next couple of weeks, and eventually plant in soil to learn more about plant life. This will help us make connections to the work that we have done, and will do, at the farm.

We also built horse drawn wagons, a connection to the book that we are reading aloud, A Quest for Celeste. Our heroine, Celeste, took a bumpy ride in a wagon in the 1800’s only to be thrown from the back into an unknown forest. Luckily she is taken in by all the forest animals, including a pair of beavers that explain how dams and beaver lodges are built. Our next project will be to construct dams, lodges, and beavers!

Writing Groups

We had a small writing group this week, and the assignment was to take pictures of what makes our class special. One child said, “We will need to take pictures of all the kids, because we make it special!” They went on to take photos in teams of two, and uploaded them so we could print copies. The children are then going to make a photo-illustrated book entitled All About the LC Class Acera. Writing the phrases “In our classroom we have a __________ .” In addition to making a class book to share with Acera visitors, the small group is working on spelling, letter spacing, punctuation, and descriptive language.

Math Groups

We have introduced week-long targeted small groups during our one-hour math block where we gather in clusters over a week to master a specific skill while the other students master familiar math games/skills. This week we gathered to learn more and master addition with carrying, and with the appropriate notation. We started by manipulating materials (a familiar skill) and moved toward the abstract, writing two 4-digit number equations and adding them together. The children learned that the “1” that you write takes the place of trading the units. They were THRILLED that they could then continue into the 100 thousands, and even millions.

Reading Groups

Several children this week read the Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, a story about a little boy’s adventures in the snow. They took turns reading aloud, practiced the book by themselves, and then read with a partner. After a few days they knew the book very well, and developed a high degree of fluency. Our population of children tend to rush, speeding through books and not always reading every word. Our book clubs slow the reading process down by reading aloud and looking at a book in depth.

This week several children were working on identifying sight words. We have sets of cards with sight words, and also each child has a personal dictionary with 100-400 lists of sight words. These tricky words often brake the spelling “rules”, for instance the word “was” is pronounced “wuz“. It takes a lot of practice to master these!

Hiker Brian vs. Race Car Brain

Happy Weekend,

Ms. Jen

Lower Elementary Reading Loft

This week we confronted some problems in the Lower Elementary classroom. Partner and small group reading has left many of our cozy cubes empty, but taking up much needed book storage and block area space. Some children’s are in the Lower Level cubbies and want to be higher, and children who have higher cubbies want to be lower. Some children have bigger cubbies, but everyone is growing out of the small spaces! Children have become such good friends, and want to read together in flexible groupings and this is hindered by the separation across the classroom.

“What if we had a reading loft?” generated a lively group discussion that lead to research on the internet, concept drawings, and a proposal meeting with Ms. Courtney!

Some of the ideas presented were two ways of getting up and down, places for Dolce (our classroom parakeet to land), cozy spaces, rock wall, increased book storage, more block space, hidden tunnels, keeping the plants, and much more! Ms. Courtney approved our project with the condition that we document our progress, create a structure that will become a permanent part of the LE Classroom, research materials, incoperate the input from architects, builders, and our parent community, and make drawings and models to scale! We heard the good news today, and we will get started right away!

Library Finished!

With the help of many LE Students, led by some of our second year students, we finished labeling and inputting our entire collection of “learning to read” books by the Guided Reading Levels A to P! We used a program called BookBuddy to scan all the barcodes so we now have a searchable library of over 300 titles. Herbie was instrumental in discovering to solutions to problems… books with no barcodes, adding pictures of each cover, and how to share the list on the “cloud”. He then went home and purchased the App with his own money so that he could scan his own library collection! Thanks Herbie!

Happy Weekend!

Ms. Jen

We Are All Together Again… + Caleb! Welcome

Our circle is complete with Maya joining us in November and this week we welcomed Caleb! The LE’s had a second opportunity to practice their gracious brand of kind leadership. Bending down to speak to Maya eye-to-eye, taking Caleb’s hand walking down the hall, and showing him where we store the stray parakeet feathers.

Art

In the new year we will be having Art on Friday afternoons, and Woodshop on Monday afternoons, providing an additional literacy block in the morning. Today Camilla presented a lesson about birch trees and perspective. Using several widths of masking tape the children made their own birch tree forest. While working the children talked about making their forests in the season of their birthdays. So we had winter, spring, summer and fall scenes.  Beautiful!

Writing

The excitement of returning to books in progress was exciting to watch! The focus this week has been on the editing process… planning, drafting, editing, and the final copy. The stage was set in the fall when we played “edit message” as a class. I would write a short paragraph with a number of mistakes in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The children edited the message, one mistake at a time. This week I let the children know that everyone creates rough drafts… even grown-ups! If you could reinforce this at home, it would make quite an impact!

Reading

Everyone was given a reading journal when they returned to create a running log of the books that they are reading. By writing down the titles, each student will pay closer attention to spelling in addition to creating a running record. It has the side effect of encouraging children to start and finish books. You should see the concentration and focus on the children’s faces each afternoon during Rest and Read!

Math

Over the break I made shelf inserts to double our math material area! It has made quite an impact with children discovering materials that were hidden. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division games were incredibly exciting and several times I heard “Math is my favorite time of day! And why is math time (one hour) so short!”

Thematic Choice

During the first three days back, getting reacquainted to classmates and classroom materials was a priority. Block building, painting, finger knitting, led to lessons about sharing space, working collaboratively, and understanding the perspective of others.

All-School Skating Field Trip

It was such fun skating with all the LE students! It was impressive to see children hitting the ice who never been on skates before. Several children acted like mini Zambonies skimming “snow” off the ice to make mini snowman on the edge of the rink. Awesome!

Happy Weekend!

Ms. Jen