Listening Conferences

Lisa and I greatly appreciated hearing from everyone after the summer break and the first eight days of school! It has been a busy start of the school year with Back to School Night, Listening, Picture Day, and our rained out Apple Picking Field Trip! It was a good call to cancel the field trip with the epic downpours, lightning and thunder! We hope that we will have another opportunity to get out and about, maybe when Ms. Lisa joins us after October 3rd.

Our next Acera event is next week! Join us for the Family Potluck on Friday, September 30th at 6:00pm-7:30pm. There will be lots of great food, fun on the playground, and some crafts for the kids!

Our Class Book

We were able to take snap shots during the picture day and created a LE Classroom Book! The students are in the process of writing a couple of sentences about their new classmates and when they are finished they can take them home. Please practice the names of the children in the class (teachers too!) to aid in the adjustment to school.

We have also been connecting children throughout the day. “Miles can help you find the pencil sharpener.” “Noah knows how to spell ‘places’.” This helps students rely on each other and make meaningful connections. Already there are small groups of students that look to sit with friends at snack and recess, please ask your child who they are sitting with during meals!

Active Play

Our classroom is definitely beehive of activity! I read this passage on my social media recently and it really resonated with me! Kindergarten and First Graders need to MOVE and find their passions! We provide SO many opportunities for students to be active throughout the day and even have a designated movement class every Wednesday for all of the LE students. Ms. Maria gets everyone jumping, balancing, hopping and cooperating! Ms. Karen has been working on the smaller muscles in our fingers by knitting with them! If your child needs significant full-body activities try and and get some large muscle work before the school day starts as we have some focused school work as the day begins. Responsibilities at home can provide the muscular work needed for concentration as the day begins.

Happy Weekend,

Ms. Jen, Ms. Lisa, Ms. Susan

Welcome Back!

We are writing our first blog of the 2022 school year after a busy fourth day of school! There is so much to share after meeting you at the Open House and combining the first year and second year students for our first week. The over aching theme of the week has been getting to know each other, the classroom, and the routines which has most likely left your students tired. It is hard to absorb so much in a short time!! We are entering all the systems slowly, mindful of this large transition.

Open House

Thank you for the GREAT turn out for the Open House! It made an impact on building community between our students, parents and teachers. It also made a difference on Opening Day when students new and returning entered the classroom, finding familiar materials to work with and friendly faces. We look forward to Back to School Night on September 15th at 7:00pm and Listening Conferences on September 16th to share more information about our daily learning and about your hopes and wishes for the year.

Morning Work

As your child enters the classroom they have the opportunity to “Take Care of the Classroom” one of our three classroom rules. The other two are “Take Care of Yourself and Take Care of Others”. Watering plants, feeding the animals, washing the windows are fun activities to look forward to as the students say goodbye to parents and enter the day. Excellent job getting to school before 9:00am each day, as we enjoy every minute of learning at Acera!

Morning Meeting

During Morning meeting we greet each other and start the day! We incorporate literacy, math, theme, and of course social/emotional work during the 15-25 minute together time. This week we have been learning all the classmates and teacher’s names by playing the “Name Stretching Game”. Ask your child about it! We pack a lot of learning into this short block of time while we build community.

Literacy

We are easing into Reading and Writing this week providing opportunities for drawing, writing, fine motor, as well as early screening opportunities. The most important literacy work at this time of the year is sharing stories, a pattern of listening and responding, that is a foundation of all language learning. We are lucky to have Ms. Susan in the classroom as our literacy specialist and many adults with kind and listening ears.

Snack & Recess

We are eating indoors this year to support healthy eating habits as well as appropriate social skills. Using utensils, access to hand washing, and appropriate seating supports healthy habits. The conversations have been delightful and provided important connections at the beginning of the school year and sprouting early friendships.

Math Groups

We have been exploring our math materials, as well as seeing numbers everywhere! We have completed the first round of math screenings “Too EAST!” and are getting ready for next steps! Our class is demonstrating huge capacity for mathematical thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving. As always we are finding the “just right” work for the individual and this will take a couple of weeks.

Rest and Read

We have EXCLUSIVELY been resting the week! Finding a cozy place to sit or lie down and having a few moments of peace, quiet, and reflection has been important. This time of day will eventually become reading instruction including “Book Clubs” where small groups of children will bond over books.

Theme

The Theme of the year is “Place”. We will start with our classroom space, move toward to the entire school environment, and then to our greater neighborhood. With so many materials to explore, we will spend the next several weeks focusing on our classroom.

Read Aloud

We are reading Stuart Little by E.B. White at the end of each day… except for today when we were in such FLOW we forgot it was the end of the day! Reading to your child every night is just about the best thing that you can do as a parent. At this age readers and non-readers need to have super star adults to read with expression and voices! Stopping to ask questions, “What do you think will happen next?” or checking for comprehension, “What just happened?!?” is important home and school work.

Greetings from Lisa

Kia Ora!

Greetings from a sunny and beautiful Saturday (Friday in MA) in New Zealand. It is early spring here and there are daffodils and lambs everywhere. I had an amazing time with my kids, Kaitlyn and Thomas, catching up with lots of family that they haven’t seen for five years. I drove on the other side of the car and the road, which is very tricky! We have seen bubbling mud and steam vents on the side of the road, soaked in thermal mineral pools, gone up a mountain in a gondola and a luge ride down, been out on a boat and gone fishing – I caught a snapper that we cooked and had for dinner. I have also been taking lots of walks along the beach where my family live.

I am so enjoying my time, but I am also very exited to get back and be in the classroom with Ms. Jen, learning and growing with all our students. I hope you all have a wonderful week and I’ll look forward to checking in about my next adventure to a place called “Hahei” which has hot water springs under the sand, at the beach!

Ms. Lisa

Life in LE this week!

We have had a wonderful re-entry into school after the long winter break! I seems like the whole class really missed each other and relaxed back into comfortable and predictable routines. That being said, we were really tired by Thursday and the snow day was a welcome respite. A Middle School teacher came through the classroom to visit the restroom and said that “The whole class is in F-L-O-W!” It was such a heart-warming observation, and Alaza and I are so very pleased with the progress that the students are making!

Morning Jobs

“We can do big things!” is something that we say a lot in Lower Elementary! 50 piece puzzle matching states with capitals, learning all lower case letters and moving to cursive, and completing the Metal Inset sequence are all exercises that help build our literacy, writing, and drawing skills. It is a high-achieving group!

Literacy

We have seen an explosion of reading! Our book clubs have resumed as well as a “Letter Club” which is helping our younger students master the letter names, letter sounds, and lower case letter formation. It has been a helpful leg-up for those students that missed out on preschool.

Math

We have started a unit on telling time, reading analog clocks, and number stories that involve estimating time. We would not be surprised if your child is talking a lot about hours, minutes, and seconds. We teach that the minute hand is longer because it has to reach all the way out to the “invisible” minutes that are on the outside of the clock. Discussions about the hand placement when it is noon or midnight, and what time we go to bed have been very animated!

Project Time

The class was very excited to get back to project time last Thursday… and when we announced the snow day, the students were disappointed that we would miss Project Time on Friday!

Specialists

This Trimester we have Ms. Kai for movement on Monday and Ms. Camilla for Art on Tuesday. Soap carving, clay self-portraits… dancing, and tossing make our afternoons fun-filled!

Warm Regards,

Ms. Jen and Ms. Alaza

Becomming a Peaceful Leader

Writing

There has been an explosion of writing across the classroom!

Reading

We are coming to the end of the My Father’s Dragon series and the students made their versions of the dragon children who were rescued from the cave by their brother Boris! They learned about color mixing in the process!

Math

We continue to explore Place Value making comparisons between the 100, 10, and 1 blocks and dollars, dimes and pennies. The students priced muffins and figured out how much each one could cost and the kinds of coins needed to put inside the muffin tins! The activity was very popular. It was so popular that some of the students made a pizza shop during Project Time!

Project Time

Having missed out on so much hands-on cooperative learning last year, the students really benefit from painting, building, pretending and even setting up project tables for their classmates!

Literacy

This week we read the book, Cherries and Cherry Pits, about a young girl that loves to draw and tell stories while she draws! This brought great excitement about storytelling and story writing. We also took story dictation down from a student and acted it out as a class in the style of Vivian Paley, a famous Kindergarten teacher, and writer. We have noticed a steady increase in excitement about writing and fluency!

Math

The stories that have been coming home about playing a new game that involves betting are true! We have been working on the automaticity of math facts 1-10 and 1-20 using a version of Blackjack. Students try and get card combinations on or close to 10 (or 20 for the older students) but not to go over… or else they lose and their partner gets the “pot”. Other than learning math facts, the students are learning how to take turns, play fair, and be gracious winners and losers. This is tricky for some of us!!

Project Time

Halloween crafts, raceways and parking lots, musical numbers, and Magnatiles have been super popular!

The best part of having students for 2 to 3 years is that the older students learn how to demonstrate activities, and to support their younger classmates understand material. In this way the older students re-learn and solidify their understanding across the curriculum. This week there was a demonstration of “What is Under the Rug?” a game in which ten unit blocks (1’s) are counted out and then some are hidden under the rug. If 4 are shown, students make guesses about what is underneath. They are getting very skilled with equations that equal ten! The student then played the same game using 10’s, 100’s, 1,000’s!

Literacy

The students in LE are taking full advantage of all the literacy options! In the photos above you can see students reading and doing all sorts of vocabulary cards including butterfly, bunny, solar system, woodland animals, deep sea creatures, leaf shapes, and the students had a great time with “label the body” cards. The class made lots of thoughtful and creative extensions such as drawing different kinds of bunnies, writing the names down from the cards, and identifying leaf shapes in our classroom. One way to help our literacy program at school is to read aloud to your child each and every night, and tell stories at every chance you get!

Math

We have been doing lots of place value activities, addition and subtraction, and small motor development by molding numbers with Wikki sticks, using Unifix cubes making combinations 1-20, building cubes from least to greatest, and trying a new kind of dice race adding two dice together using colorful patterns!

Projects

The students favorite time of day continues to be project time when groups of 2-5 students work together across the classroom playing doctor, making paper crafts, creating Magnatile marble raceways, and block towers!!

Happy Weekend!!

Ms. Jen, Ms, Alaza, and Ms. Sarah

We had a full and busy week in LE! As mentioned last week, Morning Jobs became less free choice and exploration and more about pre-literacy and literacy exercises. The students felt the change and were very tired by the end of the week! Everyone is working so hard with the new expectations, still learning the transitions and routines, and there has been a great deal of new connections and friendships!

Morning Jobs

Vocabulary cards AND journal writing were taught for the first time, and the students showed a great deal of interest! We have a series of 3-part cards (1. picture & word cards 2. picture cards, and 3. word cards) in several interest areas… aircrafts, flowers, farm life, pond life, insects, and butterflies to name a few. The students need to be quite organized, finding strategies to arrange the cards in order, make matches, and read the names. Some of the card sets have 30+, which makes the job very challenging!!

Writer’s Workshop

The students kept progressing through the handwriting book, the “Book About Me”, and the “Class Book”. We are sending the “Class Book” with faces and names of all the students in LE home as soon as it is finished so that children can practice reading it and remembering everyone’s names. It is helpful for parents, too! A second year student, who had finished all her work, wrote a story and read it to her classmates! Everyone is very excited about starting to tell and write their own stories!

Math: Ms. Jen

This week we continued to explore the math shelves, work on our number formation, and accomplish big tasks like arranging all 100 tiles on the 100 board! In math we talk a lot about which strategies to use as each student thinks about problem-solving and computation in different ways. It has been a pleasure to see the students manipulating materials to make numbers in the thousands and to notice patterns.

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Math: Ms. Alaza

We started this week with the thought question of “how long would a number line be from the door to our outside lunch area?” After brainstorming, we all agreed with the estimation of 45. We then thought of ways to test it. We decided to use chalk and yardsticks and made our way outside to make our number line. We then jumped down our number line with both feet, on one foot, by 2’s and by 3’s. The next day the thought question asked “how many feet were from the door to the outside lunch area?” We knew we used 8 yard sticks from the door to the outside classroom to make our number line so we had to figure out how many feet were in a yard stick. We found this out by observing different types of rulers and lining them up to the yard stick. We then all used different calculations to come to 24 feet! 

After this students were divided into pairs to work in for the rest of the week. Students were introduced to new materials such as the stamp game and the small bead frame. Both materials are a hands-on activity that is accompanied by sets of cards that increase in difficulty and mathematical operations, starting with the addition of two 4-digit numbers without carrying. We continued using these materials for the rest of the week while working on our focus, cooperation, frustration levels and scribing of numbers on whiteboards with the correct place value. 

Book Clubs

We started two Book Clubs this week in which 4 to 6 students and one teacher work together reading a shared book, talking about the characters and plot, playing all kinds of word games, and doing projects. Fridays are for resting… the classroom was really peaceful this afternoon as we took a pause and relaxed around the classroom for a half an hour before Art!

Woodshop: Pictures from work with Mr. Josh!

Have a great weekend!!