Routines In Our Room

It's 7:50 and the children start to filter into the room. After putting  things in their cubbies and making a lunch choice, each child stops by the Morning Message to have a go at the day's job.  Either myself or Ms.Finn is stationed nearby to read and talk it through before sending children to their table spot to complete their answer which they then bring back to tape up.

As you may know from the newsletter, we completed our first Math Menu cycle this past week!  Here is a look at the chart we used to help the class understand how to check off activities as they complete them.  

In addition to Math Menu which happens on several afternoons throughout the week, one typical mid-morning routine is doing a hands-on activity that reinforces a concept from a Literacy Mini-Lesson.  Here you can see us using cereal alphabet letters to spell names and snap words. This followed a lesson about letters coming together to make words.  You can also see us labeling the colors we mixed which followed a reading of Mouse Paint. We've added the color words to our word wall!

A less frequent routine for us is the bi-weekly All School Morning Meetings over Zoom.  This is an adaptation of what we used to do IN-PERSON in the gym every Friday morning.  Below you a can see our class paying closed attention to a student sharing about this month's Reading to Raise Anti-Racists' selection: Your Name is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins Bigelow

 

Poetry, Partners, Power (of Yet) and PJs!

 The title of this post says it all!  There is so much to share...

Our poetry journals are works-in-progress that won't come home until the end of the year. Almost every week we make an entry as a way of using our snap words as stepping stones for reading. Poems are also a fun way to use memory, rhyme, and our growing knowledge of letter sounds.  Here you can see the children incorporating science learning about sunflowers and seasonal change into their illustrations.

Partner games are a favorite way to promote math reasoning AND friendship skills.  

Partners can play games together AND make art together!

Some things are fun to do on your own.  Like use the teacher's pointer while you build and feel the Power of Yet. As the song says, "perseverance is paramount"!

After all this work and play, a little relaxing in our PJs was well deserved.  Congrats to the crew for filling our Core Values Chart for the second time.

Building Structures, Building Skills

 As promised I have some catching up to do.  Looking over the past two weeks many of the photos highlight the incredible work the children are doing with designing and building. This is no surprise since we have a shape focus in Math, however the children tap into their design skills during Explore time as well.  Have a look:

During Math we used the book A Shape is Just a Shape as an inspiration to create our own pages about the shapes we see in the world.  A trapezoid can become a boat!

During Explore time children create in two and three dimensions.

Even the chalk became a building material in the courtyard one afternoon.

Once you start focusing on noticing shapes, you can't stop!

Exploring All Around Orchard School

 This past week we had a lot of fun with shapes.  Inside the classroom the children used pattern blocks to make different pictures and recorded how many of each shape they used.

We also went beyond our classroom to see what kind of shapes we could find all around Orchard school.  It was pretty cool to stop and think that the whole world is made of shapes.  Below you can see us finding a triangle, square, and circle.

There is learning to be done and fun to be had all around Orchard!  One of our favorite spaces is the courtyard.  On Friday we took sometime to pick and eat authentic "Orchard School Apples".  We also put our number writing skills to use making hopscotch games and designed and built fairy houses with natural materials.

Back in the classroom we took a few minutes to settle in with some books...the ones we've made and have been saving in our keep boxes!  

Growing Confidence, Growing Friendships

    A look back over this second week reveals how we are making connections through new experiences. Learning takes place in so many ways throughout the day- have a look!

 Below you can see new friendships forming and turn-taking skills strengthening as partners collaborate on different ways to build a hexagon in a math game.

Here you can see tablemates concentrating and sharing collective materials as they work on individual books for their "keepbox" collections.

In this group experience, Ms. Finn guided the children in completing their own copy of the class graph that showed the different ways classmates get to school in the morning.

Sometimes important discoveries are made quietly on your own. Watercolor painting provided this opportunity.

Reaching our goal of 100 apple cores for using Core Values earned us our first whole class celebration- extra recess! It was a great way to end the week.

First Post of the Year- Welcome!

 Welcome to a new group of folks or, welcome back if you follow along.  It's the start of a brand new school year and my blog is the place to go for a look at the happenings in our classroom!  The first week of school went by in a flash despite the unusual heat.  Have a look at some important activities from the first four days.

Getting to know one another with name tags, name collages, and team work...

Exploring math materials in both open-ended and structured ways...

Hands on discoveries in the courtyard...

Fun with books at the Library and under the apple trees...

This blog works in tandem with my weekly newsletter to help families follow along with our learning.  Stay tuned for weekly updates!

Ending on a High Note

 There were so many fun moments of friendship, happiness and closure in the last week that I just can't resist posting one more time. This was a challenging year- there is no denying. But this group of children rose to that challenge and managed to support each other right up through the very last minutes of the day. In non-COVID times children have opportunities to mingle with kids in other classes- in the lunch room, on the playground, on field trips, and when classes get together for learning opportunities.  But this year WE WERE A POD.  And we stuck together without co-mingling for everyone's health and safety.  Maybe it fostered even more of a "family feeling"...take a look and you'll see what I mean.

In the final days we created life-sized portraits to see just how much we'd grown.

We had a blast doing SILLY things like cleaning tables with shaving cream...

and calm things like word searches and just being together.

On Wednesday of the last week we really enjoyed Kindergarten Fun Day!  The weather was perfect for outdoor games.

On Thursday we did an annual event in my classroom that I like to call "unroll the scroll".  This means that we took our continuous paper off of the scrolling calendar that had been showing us only a week at a time all year. and we unrolled it to literally walk back in time and remember all of our days together. Here you can see us remembering the way our year started and then children finding a day that was particularly memorable to them.

On the last day, we went out to the track to cheer as the graduating fifth graders walked a loop around the track.  It was fun to get a glimpse into the future as we saw some siblings, neighbors, and bus friends celebrating their time at Orchard. (And, we got freeze pops!)

Thanks for a wonderful year everyone!  

I look forward to seeing you in the fall.