This Week in Review - January 7 - 11

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

I think it is safe to say that most of the children were very excited and happy to be back to school after a long winter break. While all had adventures to talk about – vacations to new and thrilling places, or cozy times with families at home – it is always nice to get back to routines and to see good friends.

We started right off establishing these comforting routines with two wonderful “special readers,” Alex and Phoebe. They came prepared with very funny pictures books that were a perfect way to start off the New Year. 

We also got our brand new lists of spelling words, and practiced being “word collectors” as we thought about all the wonderful word choices to make in our own writing. What makes a word powerful, or “fancy,” or “feeling”? Our work is inspired in large part by a delightful book by Peter R. Reynolds called the Word Collector.

In Math, we circled back to a favorite game, Place Value Yahtzee. This time, we are playing a slightly harder version – with four digits. We also started a new math/art project pertaining to multiplication arrays. Children are making a multiplication city, filled with high rise buildings with windows that represent a multiplication problem (4 windows across by 5 windows down = 20 windows altogether). This nighttime cityscape will be quite dramatic once it is completed, I think, and it is also giving the students lots of concrete practice with some of the multiplication facts.

With our new theme, magic and mythology, we looked to the skies for inspiration. On Monday, the combined first and second graders listened to the myth Coyote Places the Stars. This retelling is based on a Wasco Indian legend and is a story about the origin of the constellations. We then made our own constellations using sticky stars and the letters of our names on graph paper. On Thursday, we transferred these constellations to felt using buttons for the stars. We will finish these art pieces on Monday.

Shan made sure to make our science lessons all about the stars in our lab work this week. We did a Think-Pair-Share activity where the children drew/wrote all what they already knew about stars and constellations – turns out, some came with a LOT of knowledge. They shared their knowledge with their table, and then a person from their table shared their combined ideas with the whole group. Children spent a couple of minutes thinking and sharing ideas about what they want to learn more about. Shan then shared a wonderful book called, Zoo in the Sky, by Jacqueline Mitton.