This Week in Review - May 7 - 11

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

This was an incredibly busy week, but we made it! We spent the entire week in math doing a simulation/project that had students help the president of a cereal company decide if it was a good idea to add toys to boxes in order to sell more cereal. Students needed to learn about sampling, and they did a lot of work with the data they collected - finding the mean, mode, median, and range.                              

Since we finished The Vanderbeekers last week, the children did a book review on Monday. Most children really liked the story, and were able to illustrate where the story took place and favorite character(s). Summarizing is still a skill that is being worked on. We also illustrated and recited some poems, made beautiful Mother’s Day cards, and worked on our pen pal letters. Miles and Ian did a wonderful job as our special readers on Wednesday.

The first EB session went over with a bang, and children are looking forward to more next week. 

Another special event happened on Friday morning, when we finally got to lead The Secret of the Heart Chamber meditation that we had planned for February (and that was snowed out). The children did a really nice job modeling excellent meditation techniques, and also were so sweet in saying their affirmations and giving out their origami hearts. I hope everyone was able to make it.

In Science class with Shan, children went on a scavenger hunt outside to find animal tracks. They had been hidden previously on our playground, and partners ran around with clues trying to find and identify as many as they could as quickly as possible. It was tricky! Even I, who was the one who hid them, had a hard time finding all the tracks at the end. Oops! 

In the classroom, our science lessons revolve around mealworms. We are each raising these little guys into beetles over the next couple weeks, carefully monitoring and documenting their metamorphoses.

On Friday afternoon, both 1st and 2nd grades got together to work on the city project. We postponed our trip to see a real bridge until next Friday, when the weather forecast seems a little less foreboding. Instead, children were given choices of working on putting in streets in our cardboard city, working on our the newspaper bridge STEM challenge from last week, doing research and making sketches about bridges from various library books, or creating truss bridges from craft sticks.