Posted by Alissa | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on May 28, 2015
We’ve been doing lots of work to get ready for our field trip to Northfield Mountain. These are the tadpoles and eggs we collected in our vernal pool to bring into the small pond habitat we made in our classroom for the children to observe and study. We have been reading, writing, drawing, doing puzzles and lots of research about ponds.
And today was our big trip! We arrived at Northfield Mountain and met Kathy, our Pond Teacher, who led us through their Pond Probe program. After watching a slideshow about all kinds of living things that live in the pond, we went outside to collect animals carefully with our nets and “creature extractors” along the pond’s edge. The children looked carefully, and by the time we had been there a while their eyes were getting used to finding tiny creatures buried in the mud and water. Into the buckets they went so we could bring them inside to observe them under microscopes. We drew pictures and labels of what we saw. After the program ended, we had a picnic lunch and then headed into the woods for a brisk hike on the trails. It was a hot, fun hike. Lemonade and watermelon cooled us down at the end. It was a very fun day! Thank you to all the chaperones who joined us: Jill, Tara, Mark and Kevin!
Posted by Alissa | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on May 13, 2015
It’s been an exciting week, starting off with Alina’s dad bringing in a brand new, one week old baby goat for us to meet!
We have started our unit on Ponds. This is what showed up in the block area during choice time: a mini pond made of blocks, little animals, legos and carpet pieces.
Guess where we went today? We dressed in our rain boots, gathered our clipboards and magnifying glasses, and headed out to the vernal pool on our playground to see what we could see about pond life.
The children found frogs, tadpoles, a sac of frog eggs, water beetles, snails, and lots of other small creatures.
It was a lot of fun and we came in with very muddy boots.
After we dried off, we wrote about what we observed, drew pictures and came up with “I wonder…” questions. We shared them with our classmates. Check out your child’s work, which will be in the homework folders tonight!
Posted by Alissa | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on May 7, 2015
Last week on May 1st, the children’s Morris dancing team, the Johnny Jump-Ups, came to dance and sing for our whole school. Our very own Alina was one of the dancers! She did a fantastic job and we had so much fun watching, dancing and singing with them. I thank them for dancing in some of the beautiful weather we’ve had lately! The children were full of questions for Alina after the dance celebration, and many wanted to become dancers, too!
Adam’s number scroll is now officially as tall as me. He is writing numbers well into the 1000’s and can tell you the place value of each digit.
The kids are loving making polygons with straws and pipe cleaners.
Posted by Alissa | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on May 6, 2015
Posted by Alissa | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on May 1, 2015
Look at all these beautiful creations coming out of Creation Station! We are looking for donations of any kinds of material (found, recycled, or purchased craft supplies) that the kids can use to make creative projects like these. Please send them in!! A huge thank you to Uli’s parents who have helped us greatly improve our art area in the classroom.
Look at these symmetrical designs students have been making at math time. They look so pretty against our white tiles.
More pictures to come! I’m having a hard time uploading pictures to the blog these days, so we are a little behind in our classroom updates. We’ll be back with more news soon!