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Leo Lionni Author Study

In fall of 2024, students in the younger grades met once a week and focused on the theme and author’s purpose of a story. A book by Leo Lionni was read and connections and predictions were made, while discussions were had about the topic of the story. After each story, we worked on creating a Read More >>

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Book Club: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

Students read the book Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. Each week they were responsible for reading a set of pages and writing 5 sticky notes. Each sticky note had a fact they learned about Chinese culture from the book. Students were also required to participate in a discussion about the book. Each book club Read More >>

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Banned Books

As banning books became much more common throughout the country we began a discussion with older students based on reading aloud a book called  The Day the Book Was Arrested by Nat Hentoff.   In the book, a parent objected to the reading of Huckleberry Finn due to both the racist language used to call Read More >>

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Poetry: Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages

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 >>

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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.

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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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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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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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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 >>