When we arrived back to the classroom this week, one of the students noticed a worm escapee from our classroom worm farm, so we set to work immediately sprucing up the conditions in the bin so our worms would not be interested in escaping. This meant adding lots of small ripped up paper, making it damp, and adding food scraps from lunches (banana peels, apple cores and strawberry tops this week) and mixing the bin all up. Mason was our worm wrangler this week, and he did a fantastic job checking in our our worm buddies to ensure all was well throughout the rest of the week.
In our language centers this week we followed a "create your own adventure" style of learning with all the resources we have, after our lessons. The group as a whole reviewed/learned about our third spelling rule which outlines when we use C, CK and K at the end of words. Seedlings discovered a new game in the language resources to support their reading and comprehension with sight words up to grade three. They all had a blast creating sentences with their words and LOTS of them were silly...so naturally there was lots of laughter. Conversation around homophones happened as well as some words were mistaken for their similar sounding counterparts.
Saplings began learning about clauses and phrases, and working through their exercises to discover what fragments, run on sentences and awkward phrasing was all about. It was an engaging lesson with lots of observational assessment on my part, which is why I have no picture there <3
Math centers were lessons based as well with games that followed, with Seedlings diving into The Grapes of Math in small groups after some group subitizing, to discover more about multiplication and efficient counting strategies, while Saplings worked with fraction manipulatives as we explored equivalent fractions, how every fraction is a division statement (since they are all familiar with division now) that turns a fraction into a decimal, and how fractions relate to percentages. We had a short discussion around taxes and all the places they are collected as well after some morning circle learning brought that up.
In Magic Centers this week, students were introduced to two brand new major projects we have never explored before...and wow were they all excited!! Everyone began creating a mythical creature from 2 or 3 animals of their choice, and created a name and picture of their animals. As we move through our coming afternoons, this will be a project that allows students to deep dive into science, animal classification, habitats, geography, animal webs, creation and more, as everyone will have the opportunity to develop and bring to life their creature and the world it lives in. Stay tuned for more about this exciting project....and be sure to check in with your students about it...they are very proud of their creations.
Our second project began as a seed in the Sprout room with all of their beautiful imaginative play and the current research that suggests play only requires 20 repetitions to retain new info, versus far more without play. As we move through the rest of our body magic lessons this year, I wanted the learning to be meaningful...so I shared the opportunity with students to create our own health centre in the classroom, complete with renovations (moving furniture) and creating whatever they things we need (xray machine was high on the list). Students have named the coming space The Magic Hostipal (yes that is exactly hoe they wanted it spelled lol). This led to lots of beautiful conversation around current modalities of health care and comparing those to ancient modalities of health care. I created a health care card set with descriptions of modalities/roles on the back for students to choose from in their body magic learning/play time. Preliminary discussion occurred around how long it takes to have a position, how important that position is in our care, and the many different ways we can approach health. Students were introduced to ancient alternatives (Aryuveda, TCM, Shamanism, Reiki, Quantum Touch, Herbalism, etc) and we had a deep dive discussion around what they mean and look like. The majority of our students would like to learn more specifics about how the alternative modalities work, so I have included the chart we created for sign ups. Over the next few weeks (before business immersion begins again) I will be supporting students to learn about these alternatives, which happen to be what I have worked with in my other business for the last 15 years. Students are excited to begin exploring how they work.
Recesses this week were super engaged as students played on "snow mountain" creating safe tunnels, barriers and slides. Some students were shocked to realize they could now see over the neighbours fence which they couldn't do before all the snow was there. They definitely had a blast!
Make a great weekend everyone!
Love the pure joy pics