This information is also found in Walter's weekly email:
Halloween was this week –
always an exciting time for children! At Summers-Knoll, we try our best to make
it a fun but meaningful time as well. On Monday, Grace and I held a “Paper Bag
Workshop,” in order to reiterate that eco-friendly and homemade costumes could
be creative and easy! We had a blast.
On Wednesday, the 31st, the K-2 branch of the school had SO much fun
with our annual eco-fair. After showing off our wonderful costumes at the
parade, we had a great time at Val’s “minute to win it,” Grace’s homemade play
dough station, and my felted wool acorn station. At the end of the morning, all
agreed that this year’s festivities were lovely and so “S-K.” Many thanks to
Joan and Kalyan, who supplied us with vegan (and slightly spooky!) cookies!
Another special project we
completed with Grace’s class was our pebble meditation bags. We now have a
special bags to hold our 4 pebbles used for a special practice some mornings.
We love times with our other 1st and 2nd grade buddies.
Mira and Alex were our
Special Readers this week. They both did SUCH a wonderful job. It was a little
teary for me, to be honest. One child just starting on their reading journey,
and one now very confident reader (who
was just starting on his journey this
time last year). A sense of pride and wonder fills me up each week – how does
this magic thing of “reading” happen? How do I get to be the lucky one who gets
to see it bloom each and every year?
This was our eighth week of
school. Do you know what that means? We are now about 1/4th of the
way through our school year! Incredible. To look back and see how far the
children have come in such a short time is truly amazing. One of the things we
did this week is look through our Memory Books. Each student was amazed to see
how they have grown as writers in such a short time. Some have gone from
copying a couple of words on the board to “stretching out” their own amazing
sentences using phonetic spelling. Others are filling the page and adding punctuation
and more “dictionary” spelling. This week, each child selected a piece from
their first eight weeks to add to their portfolios, and labeled it, “My Best
Writing – 11/1/18.”
It was a red banner day on
Thursday in math as we completed our 1001 Things challenge! It took us several
weeks, but we did it – we successfully spotted and counted 1001 things in the
sea, using lots of different strategies and tools. This was such a fun
mini-project. This lesson, and others like it, comes from a book called Lessons for Extending Place Value: Grade
Three, by Marilyn Burns. Marilyn Burns is just an amazing mathematics educator – I have many of her books and
resources and use them often in my own classroom.
Our Final EB of this Fall
session was on Friday. With Fairy Tale Feasts, that can only mean the dessert
course, of course! I can’t wait for the next EB session, and I know the
children are looking forward to it as well. One of the many things that makes
our school a special place to be.
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