First/Second/Third
Happy New Year, everyone! We’ve included a video and many, many photos to give you a snippet of the happenings on campus the last 3 weeks of 2020!
Language Arts: Students continue to write their Penpals weekly. We are working on penmanship and taking time to write thoughtful letters.
Students read and/or listened to many books from The Gingerbread series including, the Gingerbread Man, The Gingerbread Boy, The Gingerbread Cowboy and The Gingerbread Girl. We discussed and learned about this popular series through exploring story elements, comparing and contrasting, conflict, character analysis and opinion writing.
The Gingerbread Girl Play:
Our class worked together to bring The Gingerbread Girl story to life by performing a Readers Theater adaptation of the book. Students explored their own characters through creative movement and pantomime, voice, imagination and improvisation.
Students made connections and extended their learning by directly engaging in the main parts of the plot, beginning, middle and end, in our own outdoor setting, with costumes and class-made props. Bravo Class!
First graders are share pair reading Good-Night Owl by Pat Hutchins and are creating their own version of this classic pattern book for the classroom.
Science in the Garden: Students are working on an “In the Garden” vocabulary mini-book as part of our study on the life cycle of plants. Students are exploring and observing the winter garden and Redwood grove with a focus on winter habitats, hibernation and adaptation.
Garden Classroom
First Grade Math: The students practiced up and down counting while doing an action chosen by one of the students. It’s a great and fun way to increase number sense and facility with counting. We began to practice time to the hour, noting that the hour hand can help you always know about what time it is depending on where it is on the analog clock. We talked about analogue time and digital time and enjoyed a time-themed book called, “Monster Math”. The students had fun increasing their number sense through our Stars in One Minute activity. First, they timed me drawing as many 5 pointed stars as I could in a span of one minute. Then we counted the starts by tens and by twos. We shared and drew all the different types of stars we could imagine and then each student chose a star to draw and repeated the activity. I read aloud the story, “Draw me a Star” by Eric Carle where the students saw how to draw an 8 pointed star. We had fun practicing that one!
Stars in One Minute
The last week of school, we played the dreidel game in honor of Hanakkuh and noticed the 4 different symbols on the dreidel and discussed whether or not each of the symbols had the same chance of being spun. And then the investigation began with students playing the game in small groups.
We also made some beautiful geometric, six-sided snowflakes where students shared and learned more about various common shapes and symmetry.
Second/Third Grade Math: The second/third graders continued to work on logic and place value and to build on their fact power. They practiced the plus 9 shortcut (add 10 and take away 1) using the white boards and the games of Fast 10s and Fast 9s.
The students cut out their first set of triangle fact cards that do a great job of showing fact families and the relationship between addition and subtraction. They practiced fact families with domino images and created fact family houses to help reinforce the relationship. The last week before winter break, the students investigated the dreidel game and the chance of each symbol being spun. We talked about how each symbol has a one in four chance. They recorded their spins as a group and then recorded their results on the class chart.
We also enjoyed making the beautiful, six-sided snowflakes where we could reinforce the names of geometric shapes and notice symmetrical patterns.
Animals: The kids continue to enjoy their time with the animals and were saddened when Porcupine passed away. They have been helping to build a rain trench around the alpaca enclosure and have discovered the ground is a rich haven for earthworms. Some really enjoy sketching the animals, especially the alpacas. We are working on naming our chickens – there are a lot of ideas currently!
Roxaboxen: The students have been active in Roxaboxen, remodeling and rebuilding. They are working on and doing well with practicing kind and compassionate communication as they work on projects, share space, and develop their Roxaboxen society.
