Over the last few months, all of the kindergarten and first graders have been in a magnet class during Investigations that was a total of five classes. The groups were split up into two groups and they met about once a week. This class was incredibly fun for them because they all love magnets and Read More >>
Bugscopters
This fascinating investigation was created by Larry Schafer, the amazing science educator at Syracuse University. It starts with a box wrapped up as a gift. In the box is a letter from Bugso, challenging the class to become scientists and discover as much as they can about the Bugsocopter. After experimenting with the Bugsocopters, children Read More >>
The Constitution
Over the winter five of our oldest students looked at American History and specifically the Declaration of Independence and the forming of the Constitution. After Visual Thinking Strategies to interpret the Join or Die cartoon, students read sections of the Declaration, putting the text into their own words. Then they recited their sections.We then turned Read More >>
Braille and Bridgeman Book Club
Students in our middle group of students this fall, have been reading a biography by Margaret Davidson titled Louis Braille: The Boy Who Invented Books for the Blind. At the same time we’ve slowly been reading the picture book Six Dots: The Story of Young Louis Braille by Jen Bryant in our class each week Read More >>
From Blend it to Xerox
In mid November Kindergarteners moved on from constructing words with objects, for example a Comb, Apple and a Turtle means CAT to making them with their sound boards. A sound board allows the students to have a group of consonants and one vowel (a) to make words. They began by making two letter “words” like Read More >>
Tuck Everlasting Book Club
In late October, early November we began reading a book called Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. This is a book that essentially asks the question if you had the choice to live forever would you do it? This is how the book is introduced to the students, as they had been talking about immortality recently. Read More >>
13 Colonies
In December the 2nd-4th graders were able to begin a Unit Plan on the 13 Colonies. The students were very excited to be learning about the United States history, but first it had to be explained to the students that the United States started off as the 13 Colonies. They were very shocked to learn Read More >>
Geometry
In the middle of November a few students began a Geometry Unit. The goal of this unit was for students to be able to identify a variety of shapes and be able to count their sides and vertices. We primarily worked with shapes with 3-6 sides. All students excelled in this, and were even able Read More >>
Electricity
Over the past few months the students have been learning about electricity. This is a very exciting topic for the students because electricity means a lot of activities and experiments! We learned how to light up a lightbulb only using a battery, lightbulb and two wires and that it makes a complete circuit which the Read More >>
Density and Viscosity
Density and Viscosity This fall, the three seventh graders have been exploring the similarities and differences between density and viscosity. We started by defining the terms: demonstrate, model, interpret, density, viscosity and environment and then watched a video on determining the different densities of oil, water and syrup. Students asked ten questions of the video, Read More >>