This Week in Review - September 24 - 28

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

As September draws to a close, the weather finally turns a bit more fall-like. Our Nature Explorers are looking forward to seeing some color in the leaves! We didn’t let some unexpected rainy weather delay our long-anticipated trip to the Toledo Museum of Art to see the Rebecca Louise Law Installation. This dried floral exhibit was a wonder for many of our senses!

Here we all are! Can you spot us all?

We were inspired upon our return to work with dried flowers too – so on Thursday, we made sweet lavender sachets to make our closets and drawers smell so good. Children also got to practice their sewing skills – they will be quite good by the end of the year! I can’t tell you how amazing our room smelled after this project.

On Monday we heard from our two wonderful Special Readers, Phoebe and Jackson. They read great picture books that I had never heard before, and did so with great humor and liveliness. It was wonderful to see parents and grandparents in the audience.

Phoebe got a second chance to read a couple days later, as she brought in a special birthday book to donate to our collection! It was a perfect choice as it was the sequel to the first book. This time, she read to a larger audience – the combined first and second grade classes. (If your child donates a book for his/her birthday, they can read it, or I can – their choice.)

Our first Environmental Super Hero project was a success! The Waste Free Lunch challenge on Wednesday produced just one tiny wrapper in the trash!  We really learned a lot about how to reduce waste, and how to better take care of our compostables and recyclables in our lunches. We talked about what we learned at the Friday Morning Meeting! This was kind of scary, but important work.

We’re all about big numbers in math – and we made it to the millions place in our high number game! So much excitement! We are finding our strategy has to change just a bit, so it is interesting. Because 1,000,000 is such an interesting number, I read a picture book this week called A Million Dots by Andrew Clements. This was a fascinating book for the children to wonder and look at.

We also learned a new partner game called 101 and out. This takes knowledge of simple place value, strategy, and luck.

In Science Lab this week, Shan set up a simulation that really made children understand pollination. Students became bees and had to collect nectar (a piece of wrapped candy) from one flower and then land on another flower. However, they had to reach through pollen (cheese puffs) to get to the nectar. Guess what happened? The pollen stuck on their bee legs and was transferred from one flower to the next. On Monday, we will have a special treat with an additional science class as Logan’s mom will come in with an observation hive!