Friday, October 13, 2017

Week in Review - October 9 - 13

                                             This information is also found in Walter's weekly email:

This was a week of starting new projects and wrapping up some old ones. In math class, we learned a new game called Close to 100. We are really honing our place value skills, as well as stretching our logic brain and math sense. The Singapore Math Books keep us humming along at our own pace and individual levels. 

Of course, our big excitement this week was that we started our first round of EBs. The children were thrilled to learn that they got their first choices, and spent two hours this week learning and exploring topics ranging from stars to photography to engineering to mazes. 





Wednesday brought rain, so we broke out our umbrellas for the first time and went on an umbrella walk. We also went on our first Science/Nature hike with naturalist Kelsey on Friday afternoon. So many firsts!

Each month our class does an Environmental Super Hero Project, and October's project is vermicomposting. On Friday morning, the students helped prepare the worm bed, and received 2000 or so red wigglers compost worms. This is the beginning of a year-long composting project.

We wrapped up our "I Am" poem projects, and finished our word clouds. Both of these mini-projects are part of our much larger identity project. Another identity project happened in the Science Lab on Wednesday. Shan has the children learning about DNA and genetics, and we did a wonderful hands-on experiment where we extracted the DNA from strawberries! Shan even gave each student a little vial necklace so they could wear a bit of the strawberry DNA home at the end of the day. 



Students are in the midst of reading all they can at home for Read-to-Feed, and excitedly report to me each day. This service project will continue until the end of October. Of course, we continue working each week on Memory Pages, Poetry Anthologies, and Special Readers. This week, we heard from two brand new special readers - Nels and Miles. They did an absolutely FANTASTIC job for their first time out, and had a very loving and appreciative audience. 



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