Good Times- Outside and In

This week was marked by several culminating activities which will be a theme from here on out.  Have a look at us listening to Meg at our last Farm to School lesson right in the garden.

These pictures can hardly capture the excitement on Taylor's art focused Candle Day but I did my best.  Check out the balloon tossed splatter painting...

Back inside we learned a lot about cool vehicles this week.  On Tuesday we had our final session of Lego Robotics during which all the teams made a "float" for the parade. Here they are preparing, programming, presenting and parading!

And here we are learning from Elijah on his Candle Day about Art Vehicles- who knew these kinds of cars and trucks existed? Elijah is an expert!

Our Tomie dePaola Author Study VoiceThread is Ready!

Here is the VoiceThread documentation of our Tomie dePaola author study!  I hope you enjoy watching and listening to what we learned from Tomie as well as the children's original stories they were inspired to write after reading his books.

Getting Serious (about stories, straws and summer time fun)

The end of the year is special for so many reasons.  To begin, the children have grown tremendously in their ability to show their thinking with pencil and paper.  Take a look at this student's Venn diagram about the characters Frog and Toad.

Secondly, I always feel that it starts to sink in around this time that the remaining days with the current configuration of classmates are limited.  It is wonderful to see the crew "banding together" as evidenced by this "architectural feat" with straw connectors at Explore.

And then of course there's the way we are able to listen to and learn from one another as we did during a Candle Day about family camping.  We tried our hand at storytelling inside and and outside the tent!

Candle Days, Courtyard Days

This week we were fortunate to have two children's Candle Days.  We gathered together to learn from one friend about witnessing the transformation of a caterpillar to butterfly first hand ! And from another friend about special family time at the beach in Maine- including catching crabs!  Candle Days are a powerful way to learn new things FROM and ABOUT each other.

We ended our week with a Math lesson in the courtyard.  The objective- to draw a 10 frame, fill it with your choice of items from nature, and write a corresponding equation.  Math fun in the sun!

Skyping with Tomie

Almost all of my posts are attempts at summing up our week by highlighting key activities or events.  This past Monday's Skype Meeting with author/illustrator Tomie dePaola just needed it's own post!  Tomie has been a major inspiration for the way I teach writing and my work with children in general.  He was a favorite author of mine when I was a child and I think I sensed then something that became clear to me though our meeting over Skype and that is, he seems to understand and not underestimate the complexity of children's emotions.  He answered our questions with honesty and depth while still being aware of how a young child would process the information.  Here are some pictures of us looking at him as well as us sending him a photo of us making his signature symbol- a heart.

Hearing Tomie talk about connecting with his breath at times when he is mad or sad as a way of bringing himself back to calm felt like affirming words of wisdom given all our work on strategies for getting and staying "in the green zone". A special thanks to Donna Mac Donald, our librarian for helping with the the technical aspects of this event and for supplying these photos.

The Great Outdoors and More

This week brought "May the fourth [be with you]" for Star Wars Fans, a Cinco de Mayo dance party with great music courtesy of Mr. White, and several opportunities to learn in nature.  Below you can see us spotting a nest under the eaves of the building on our second bird walk with Julie from Americorps.  We also spotted a Turkey Vulture and laid down pretending to be dead in the hopes of luring it closer! (A little morbid but we were being dedicated birders). In connection with our Farm to School lesson about beans- we made bean dip with Miss Meg and also planted some peas of our own in the courtyard.  And of course there's always work to be done collecting and arranging natural materials for the fairies in among the newly blossomed tulips and daffodils.

And when you plant peas, you sometimes find other special things like a snail!