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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 >>

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Plant Class

Over the winter, we have been working in depth with plants. Topics included In class, we grew a bean plant from seed in dirt and a potato plant from a potato using water initially. We have recently planted the potato plant and its roots into a soil bag and will look for potatoes at the Read More >>

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Soap and Bubbles

In March we started a unit called, Soap, Film and Bubbles where students are learning about surface tension, and the chemistry of soap and water. Students have done experiments with bubble clusters, where they made clusters of three and four and found different ways to make shapes. They learned about surface tension and were mainly Read More >>

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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 >>

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Civil War

Our unit started with learning about the Triangle Trade route, and locating and identifying the countries and goods involved. We then studied how Africans brought to the New World were forced to participate in this trade through the Middle Passage. Students studied images of slave auctions using the Visual Thinking Strategies: What’s going on in Read More >>

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Cubist Portraits

This project started in February with a slide show of Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits. As always the children had amazing observations about color, geometric shapes and unusual perspectives. Each student then created his/her own cubist portrait, which was attached to their Valentine Bags.

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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 >>

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Poetry

Inspired by the teaching of Kenneth Koch, and his brilliant books “Rose, Where did you get that Red” and “Wishes, Lies and Dreams,” our oldest students explored their poetic talents, some for the very first time. Each class began with a mini-lesson, which included reading and discussing poems written by other children on the topic. Read More >>

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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 >>

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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 >>