Students in Kindergarten and First Grade have been learning about the culture of India through the use of the book Count Your Way Through India by Jim Haskins. We started at one and learned about how to say this number in Hindi and about the amazing banyan tree. Students then drew their own banyan tree Read More >>
Grasslands
Our youngest students continue their study of biomes. In December we moved our focus from the rain forest to grasslands. We listened to books and learned how grasslands are very different to rain forest. There are very few trees in the grassland and there are two seasons – a wet season and a dry season. We watched videos Read More >>
Folktales Retold
Folktales Retold is a class in which the kindergarten and first grade students meet two times a week during Silent Reading time to listen to picture books of folktales. We have read several versions of Little Red Riding Hood. Some were retellings of the traditional story, such as Richard Scarry’s Little Red Riding Hood, Gennady Read More >>
Printing
The youngest group of students are participating in a printing class. They are working their way through the alphabet learning how to form all the capital letters correctly. They have worked on the letters A-M so far and will continue to practice the rest of the capital letters before moving onto lower case letters.
Blend-it
Our youngest students spent the first 6 weeks of school playing many games where they worked on identifying the sounds of letters in our alphabet. After giving them all a letter/sound assessment in October (see above) we decided they were ready to start a class we call Blend-it. This class focuses on teaching children how Read More >>
Picture stretch
Four of our youngest students started a class in late October where they are using pictures to help them identify sounds in the words. For the activity each child draws a picture out a bag, identifies the letter the word begins with, writes the capital and lower case version of the letter and then S-T-R-E-T-C-H-E-S Read More >>
Rain Forest
The eleven youngest students started the year learning about the Rain Forest. New concepts and vocabulary were introduced as they listened to and discussed the content of many books on the subject. If I Ran the Rain Forest by Bonnie Worth and Rain, Rain, Rain Forest by Brenda Guiberson helped the children learn about the Read More >>
Explorers
Students in grades K-2 started a social students unit this fall on explorers. Students were first asked to explain the difference between an Explorer and Exploring and came up with statements such as: Explore means to look for things and Explorer is something or someone that discovers things; Explore means to find things and Explorer is someone that Read More >>
Flying Airplanes!
How do airplanes fly? That is a question that our younger students (K-2) explored during Investigations. They made paper airplanes and tested them to see how far they could fly. Then they modified their planes to see if they could get them to fly farther. They compared their recorded distances to draw their conclusions.
Layers of the Earth
The youngest group of students has been learning about the layers of the earth. We started off our unit by reading parts of Gail Gibbon’s bookPlanet Earth/Inside Out and How to Dig a Hole to the Otherside of the World by Faith McNulty. As we learned about the many layers, we made small models out of clay and Read More >>