This Week in Review - April 22 - 26

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

April is a special month in many ways, including spring holidays like Passover and Easter, Earth Day, Autism Awareness Month – and, of course, it’s Poetry Month! We celebrate poetry every week in our class, and the children are wonderful at listening to and appreciating all types of poetry. This week, on Thursday, we held our annual Poem in Pocket tea party, where children and parents alike read poetry and munched on delectable handcrafted tartlets the children made that morning.  

On Friday morning, we cheered our buddies from Grace’s class on as they presented at the all-school meeting. They read poetry and handed out little pocket poems for each of us!

Math class has been a lot of fun as we continue our study of probability and statistics. We delved into finding the mean, mode, range, and median of a set of numbers this week. Finding the mean (or average) was an important skill to learn because we had an important task at hand. We need to do a sampling project for the president of a cereal company in order to tell her whether or not putting toys in boxes of cereal was a financially wise idea.

In science lab this week, Shan shared the book All the Way to the Ocean. Children then participated in an interactive story that illustrated in a very visual and effective way how, as human populations have increased and land uses have changed, many of our rivers have become polluted. Each child was given a card with a part of the story on it, along with something associated with the card to add to the “river” (a big bowl of clear water). For instance, their card might read “factory,” and they may need to add dirty wastewater represented by red colored water. We then brainstormed together ways that everyone could be part of the solution, just as we are all part of the problem.

Our seed project is coming along nicely. Children are learning terms like organic and heirloom, and what it means when it comes to making seed and plant choices. We are also learning about different methods of seed saving. On Monday we saved seeds from organic squash, which was just slightly more difficult than peppers as we needed to rinse the seeds with water. 

On Thursday, we learned about the process of fermentation as we are using this potentially stinky way to gather seeds from beautiful heirloom tomatoes.

We are practicing our Readers Theaters scripts like crazy so we can rock our turn as Friday Morning presenters next week, May 3^rd. We are still very much enjoying Mrs. Piggle Wiggle cures as we continue reading the next in the series, Happy Birthday, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Spelling, quiet reading, buddy reading, drawing and writing – it’s all part and parcel of our busy days at school. Miles did a lovely job this week as Special Reader. We are ALL learning to read aloud with lovely expression – a joy to hear!