Celebration of Community
/We were able to start using our Cedar Classroom (gazebo) this week! We invited Mr. Mark in to give us a presentation about native plant species and talk to us about the intentionality he used when designing the gardens in the outdoor classroom. We took a tour and counted five gardens in our outdoor classroom- the tree garden, the fern garden, the meadow, the living roof, and the bioswale. Mr. Mark told us he used the acronym STEMSS (Sun, type, environment, moisture, size, and speed of growth) when deciding what to plant. We will begin our in-depth research of the the plants in our outdoor classroom gardens this week. This week we also collected new beautiful leaves for our oil pastel leaf art project.
Our college buddies visited us during Writer’s Workshop time this week. We worked on wrapping up our unit on personal narratives and student authors each picked a personal narrative to publish. Our college buddies helped us go through our publishing checklist, which involved adding details to words and pictures, polishing up our penmanship, checking for correct capitals and punctuation, and designing a cover. We were excited to add 15 new published stories to class library this week!
We continued our clay explorations by beginning work on our tea cups. Student artists used their knowledge of clay to sculpt and shape their own tea cups. These tea cups will be fired in the kiln, glazed, and used during our poetry tea times this year.
During numeracy this week we learned how to play addition war with our parent volunteers. We are working at our fluency with number facts 0-20. We are also working on memorizing our doubles facts (3+3, 8+8, etc). We played a gross motor game that involved practicing our doubles when we visited Ms. Aja’s math center. We continued drawing code for Ozobot during project time this week.
Ivan’s nana, a music teacher, came in to lead a music making session with us this week. Ivan’s nana and mom taught us a new Halloween song and the accompanying motions. We sang and played instruments. We love when our parent and grandparent volunteers share their time and talents with us.
Of course we spent much time savoring books together, as usual. We took our weekly trip to the library, chose new books for our personal book baskets, and finished our class read aloud of Wishtree.
We finished our partner interviews this week. As a class we developed a list of questions we wanted to learn about each other. Then students were partnered up with a new friend to conduct the interviews. We learned lots of interesting facts about our friends.
We got to celebrate Ella’s birthday this week! Ella used the smart board to share photos and stories from her infancy and toddlerhood. We presented her with a birthday book filled with birthday messages from her friends. We loved celebrating this sweet, compassionate girl.
Mr. Mark finished washing our tie-dyed fabrics this weekend and we got to take home our new art. Thank you Mr. Mark for your hard work in making this wonderful ELC tradition happen.
We ended our week together with our annual Celebration of Community. Otters were excited to show their families around their learning spaces. What a joy to be part of such a loving community.
