This Week in Review - April 8 - 12

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

We started a new unit this week in math, one that should last all the way up to the end of the year. We are learning and playing with the concepts of statistics and probability. This week, I introduced probability simply as the chance or odds of something happening – how likely it is that it may rain, or that that I wear jeans to school (very high, as it turns out). We had great conversations about things that are definitely going to happen, may happen, or will never happen. Our classroom games revolved around something having a 50-50 chance, a coin toss. Several children started the week thinking that the chance of a coin landing on tails increased after tossing heads many times in a row – they needed to find out for themselves that each and every time a coin is tossed there was an equal chance of either a head or a tail, no matter what preceded it. Coins are indeed, “dumb.”

Our Special Readers were Emma and Ian, and both did stellar jobs. Our big writing project – our myth anthology – is very nearly finished. Only a few children continue to work on their final touches. Other children worked on their memory books. We also recited and illustrated our weekly poem, and spent a lovely time with Beck, our librarian.

During our project time, each child made their own wormery! These little compost stations will teach us a lot about how worms eat organic material found in the soil, our leftover bits of snack, and then produce a lot of lovely worm castings. These wormeries will be sent home at the end of the school year, and can be added to your own gardens. 

We also welcomed Farmer Michael from Nature and Nurture Seeds. He came to talk about his job on a seed farm, and demonstrated one way to save/collect seeds. He donated a lot of lovely catalogs and seed packages to inspire us on our next big project. We will start saving seeds on Monday, starting with a couple types of peppers.