Each student planted their own succulent this week and will take care of it throughout the year. Childrens' innate compassion and desire to nurture/care for another living thing became so clear as we planted. Many named their plants, wanted to find the most perfect sunny spot to place their succulents, and asked throughout the day to check on their plants. (I even observed some students talking to their new succulents!)
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While our focus is to help students develop specific skills in maths, such as multiplication or decoding story problems, one of my overarching goals is for students to play with math. I love the website YouCubed, because it offers so many activities that show the open, visual, and creative nature of maths. This week students worked on the following challenge to help them experience this for themselves:
You have three colored blocks: red, blue, and yellow. You have to combine three colors to make a tower. How many different towers can you make? At first, everyone agreed, “This is so easy, 1!” Then after a minute, “No, wait, three.” Then, the class became quiet as everyone worked on paper or with manipulatives, exploring combinations of towers. Once everyone reached the conclusion that you could make 6 different towers using these three colors, we met as a group to discuss strategies about how we each arrived at this answer. Some students used an outline of three-block towers and worked systematically, using colored pencils to color a yellow block in each outline, then a blue block in another space, then the last open space with red. Others worked with Unifix cubes and explained that they tested how many towers they could make with blue on top and found that this was only two, and then did the same thing with red and yellow colors. These photos show some of the activities the students have been engaged in as we explore our first project all about urban design and its impact on people and the environment. You will see students creating word webs to brainstorm the elements of cities, making collages with these features, walking through Kerry Town with urban planners, and more. Students loved learning about the sustainable designs of City Hall, and after, connecting this to the science of the water cycle.
Students explored the water cycle through playing a dice game where they became a water drop and traced their journey through visting different stations (such as cloud, animal, groundwater, and more). We also walked around the neighborhood by our school, making observations of the built/natural environments. Students pointed out where they saw storm drains, compared the number of impermeable to permeable surfaces, and used their senses to take note of how the design of the various spaces made us feel. This week we visited the preschool room again to share our quiet reading time with younger buddies. Students look forward to this visit each week. They love entering into a new space, especially once with so many engaging toys and activities, and they also enjoy sharing laughs and imagination with younger students. Reading with younger students helps our 3/4s to build many skills. Through introducing themselves and finding a quiet spot to read, students build interpersonal skills, they learn how to become mentors who care and look out for others, and how to be role models. Through reading aloud, students not only get practice in their public speaking, but they learn how to create an engaging experience, build their reading comprehension, and synthesize illustrations with text.
Every week our class will visit the preschool classrooms to read aloud to them. For our first week of coming together, we thought it best that the students get to know each other through what they know best--play! We spent Wednesday morning playing with, and getting to know better, the preschool students. Though timid at first, the energy from this was electric and students could not wait to go back again for our second visit.
Photos from our bi-annual team-building trip to the Tree Runner Adventure Park in West Bloomfield! We love this trip as it helps students push their boundaries and get to learn their classmates outside of the classroom setting.
Last year, with the help of a few parents, the 3rd/4th graders built a vermi-composting bin--a compost system that uses worms to eat our food scraps! On Friday, our 10,000 worms arrived and our new students were able to set the bin up and get their hands dirty. The photos above show students weighing our worms, laying down paper/straw bedding, adding food scraps, and covering everything with moist newspaper. The 3/4 classes are responsible for taking care of this living system all year. Through this process, students learn about biological decomposition, nitrogen/carbon cycles, the importance of micro-organisms, and more! The big idea is to show students how to create closed-loop cycles--why waste the energy held in our food scraps by putting them in a landfill when we can harvest that energy to create more food?
Our year is off to a great start! These photos show some of the activities of the first week---exploring makerspace tools, sharing our favorite books, meeting the chickens, and creating signs for our PEACE PLAN classroom guidelines!
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