Off to a Great Start!
/The Sea Lions had a fantastic first week of school. Our first few days of school were focused on getting to know each other and building a sense of community in our classroom. We filled out “All About Me” sheets, shared details about ourselves in our group meetings, memorized each other’s names, and even practiced spelling our classmate’s names.
On Thursday and Friday, we did partner interviews to learn more about each other and practiced our note-taking skills. Then we took our time designing artistic name tags for our classmates, focusing on including the colors and pictures that they would love the most. We’re excited to hang these up in our classroom and start adding more art to our walls.
The Sea Lions have also been enjoying the different math and engineering activities we’ve done. We worked on making graphs and comparing data (based on class poll questions), thinking about how to complete number patterns, and making a variety of mathematical equations to equal a target number. Today, some of the Sea Lions had fun learning how to solve Sudoku puzzles. Our favorite engineering challenge was to see how long of a paper chain each partner group could create out of a single sheet of paper. After learning about the different methods that worked best, the Sea Lions wanted to combine their chains into one long chain, so we used our measuring skills to determine how long it is in inches, centimeters, and feet. It turns out that the big class paper chain is as long as 4 Sea Lion students!
Today, we started writing stories during Writer’s Workshop. We loved it so much that the Sea Lions didn’t want to stop when it was time to go outside for our snack break. They were happy to keep writing even longer and several students chose to continue writing during our free choice project time.
We’ve been working as a community to make group decisions about our classroom routines, values/expectations, seating arrangements, and more. We even voted on names for our special sea lion friends: Say hello to our class mascots, Floof and Lilly!
The Sea Lions enjoy spending time with the Otter class each day during lunch and outside choice time. They have been building waterways, playing freeze tag, playing dodgeball, and lots more. I can see them developing friendships and learning lots about how to interact with each other kindly.
It has been a fun-filled and busy week! We can’t wait to see what else lies ahead as we keep learning together.
