Lucy Calkins inspired a poetry unit for our students in grades K-3. Starting in September, each week of this unit inspires children to consider a new “ingredient” or strategy. The unit began with experimenting with looking at ordinary things in a new way. Subsequent classes explored looking at patterns in poetry, music, line breaks and Read More >>
Writing Workshop
Children in Kindergarten and First Grade participated in a writing class this spring where they “played” with words and pictures. They worked on rhyming, fact & opinion and writing descriptive sentences. Here are some examples of their writing.
Art Class with Ginger
At least twice a week, the kindergarteners and first graders have free art where they explore various mediums. We generally pull out at least two different mediums they can choose to work with such as acrylic paint, cardboard sculpture, playdough and modeling clay, watercolor paint, collage, chinese brush painting and pastels. We have been working Read More >>
Book Club: Henry and Mudge/Mr. Putter and Tabby
In January we started reading Henry and Mudge and the Snowman plan, looking at the story elements of this story. Before they started reading we had a class about what story elements are and students had a good understanding of characters, setting and events in stories. They learned when figuring out the characters you ask Read More >>
Inventions
In January 2023 we started an Invention unit, inspired in part by the many inventions we learned about during our study of the Industrial Revolution. We started this unit by watching a few videos. Bill Nye always offers interesting and humorous videos on science topics. Then we watched videos that documented two recent real world Read More >>
Alphabet Books
Doug Dubois, father of Cyrus, introduced us to the fascinating work of MacArthur Fellow, Wendy Ewald who began fostering literacy via photography and storytelling with children in the 1970s. Together we decided to create an alphabet book, randomly assigning each child a letter of the alphabet. Doug and Leah came to our school multiple times Read More >>
Industrial Revolution Essay
As a culminating activity for our year long study of the Industrial Revolution, all the students were asked to develop an essay evaluating its positive and negative effects. Many historical documents, photos, journal entries, cartoons, were studied and discussed. The class sorted these documents into positive and negative piles, and of course some didn’t belong Read More >>
Grammar: Nouns and Verbs
Starting in late September, this grammar class learned about nouns and verbs. This class took place either during morning meetings or during snack time. During the first two lessons, students learned about possessive nouns, specifically where apostrophes and “s” are placed depending on the word being singular, plural, or plural with an “s” already at Read More >>
Mississippi Bridge
Starting in September, we read a book called Mississippi Bridge by Mildred D. Taylor. Due to the dark content and usage of derogatory words, the group of students had to have a mature mindset to read this book. This book gave students insight into the unjust segregation and racism from the time period. In addition, Read More >>
Lyle the Crocodile
Students in kindergarten and first grade have been listening to stories by Bernard Wabber about Lyle the Crocodile. As we read these stories, we discuss vocabulary such as: useful, desperately, toothsome, frightened, performing, permit and signal. Students are then asked to draw a picture and dictate words about Lyle and themselves. This starts a conversation Read More >>
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