Weekly Update - February 18 - 22

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

I think the children would all agree – it was great to be back to school, even though many told of great adventures of mid-winter break. It was our turn to write a question on the big blackboard at the front entrance, so our question centered around “vacation or stay-cation?” It was a fun way to share our experiences, and to learn of our wider school community experiences too.

In my math group, we are spending the next few weeks learning all about money. This will lead up to our big Flea Market Math activity right before our next break at the end of March. This week, we are exploring coin values and making exchanges. As inspiration and to add a bit of fun, we used two Shel Silverstein poems – Smart and The Googies are Coming.

Finley and Emma were amazing Special Readers on Tuesday! It is always my supreme joy to watch readers become more confident as the year progresses. 

Other routines this week included our new spelling lists, quiet reading, poetry reading and illustration, and lots of shared picture books. We also really enjoyed a shorter chapter book called The Magician’s Boy by Susan Cooper.

It had been a couple weeks since the children had attempted a memory page writing projects – due to all sorts of weather complications and special events – but we climbed back on that saddle this week. We cast our memories back to the day before break when we did the valentine exchange and wrote about that special event. Students also spent some time looking through all of their memory pages and picked one for their portfolios as “best works.”

Project time was spent looking at the moon – specifically, the eight main phases the moon goes through – new moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full moon, waning gibbous, last quarter, and waning crescent. Children made flipbooks after listening to a moon myth from Australia, Why the Moon Waxes and Wanes.

Grace’s class and our class combined forces this week in science lab to learn about the sun, our closest star. As usual, Shan found a fun, hands-on way to introduce the concept that the sun has layers. Partners layered an apple with different colors of clay to represent all six of its layers, with tissue paper representing the corona. Cutting the apple showed the beautiful layers, and each partner got to take home a piece of the sun.

P.E. time was a big hit with the children due to our new batch of the white stuff. Shan took the children sledding and they came back with rosy cheeks and exclamations of wanting more snowy adventures.

On Friday, we had a glorious and sunny winter day of our February Environmental Super Hero Project. We took a nature walk to feed the birds and animals of the woods, expressed appreciation for all that our natural world gives us, and took some time for playing, tree climbing, and hot chocolate drinking.