This Week in Review - February 19 - 23

                                       This information is also found in Walter's weekly email

Pocket riddles (coin puzzles), tiny houses (geometry, area, perimeter), and math books rounded out math time Monday through Thursday this week. We didn't have math on Friday morning as we headed off to Wild Swan Theater with Grace's class for another wonderful production - Under the African Sky.

We practiced spelling words, recited and illustrated a lovely city poem for our anthology called Things to Do If You Are a Subway, and enjoyed two very special readers, Alex and Sophia. Sadly, we finished our chapter book, A Cricket in Times Square, and will be reviewing it early next week. I hope the children liked it as much as I did. We also started a skyscraper collage project using paint strips (the kind you find in hardware stores) - I'm pretty excited about it. These will be used as inspiration for a future poetry project. And, of course, work progresses on our memoirs - we hope to get these wrapped up soon.

In Science, Shan had small groups of children brainstorm what city "critters" needed to survive. They came up with food, water, shelter, and space. Each group then had to come up with as many ways animals could find those things in a city and write/draw them on big pieces of paper. They did this silently as they went to different pieces of labeled chart paper, and then shared out their ideas. 

Our Environmental Super Hero project for February was making "valentines for the birds". We mixed a bunch of yummy ingredients together to make a sort of dough, cut out heart shapes, patted in some bird seed, and baked. It was messy and fun, and I'm sure the treats will be appreciated by the backyard birds. 

On Friday afternoon, Grace's class and my class got together to start our city planners project. Both classes are reading How Cities Work during the week, and are talking about all the things a small to mid-size city needs to thrive. We will be working together to plan and build a city using cardboard and other items - each child being responsible for at least one type of building, but also working cooperatively to make roads, bridges, and so on.