Mix-It Up Day

Younger and older classes throughout the school got together to mix-it up.  We join with our buddy classroom, Ms. Natalie's 4th grade class from the Wonder Team, just across the kiva from us.  We shared our "If you give a mouse a cookie" style books that we wrote.  The 4th grade students shared their favorite parts of realistic fiction stories that they had written.  We were amazed to see that their stories were up to 10 pages long.

Interviewing

One of the children recently asked, "How do we know what life was like long ago?"  We discussed how people told stories about their lives that were written down or passed down orally.  We decided to do some primary research on our own.  We interviewed Barbara, a volunteer and former Kindergarten teacher, to find out how her childhood was different from ours.  We prepared our questions ahead of time and waited patiently to speak to her.  We took notes as she spoke.  It felt like the press corps!  Now we are excited to interview relatives or family friends to find out what life was like long ago for our November share theme.

Our para-educator Claire made a time line for us to see about her life in the past.  We had many questions for Claire too about her childhood.

Laptops and Google Docs

Students chose their best personal narrative and began typing them into a Google doc. Students learned how to log into our network at school and set up their own Google account. They do not have email accounts, just the ability to access their Google drive, create and save documents. Eventually we  will learn how to share docs with each other and with parents. 

Special Visitor!

Kaiden's dad happen to be working with some big equipment across the street from school this week. The kids were glued to the window during snack time to watch the machinery. We gave him a call and invited him to drive over his bobcat and let Kaiden teach us a thing or two about how it works...yes, Kaiden is a skilled bobcat driver! Students always make the best teachers! Thank you Kaiden and Jamie!!

Giant Vermont Map

We had a special invitation from our 4th grade buddy classroom to explore a giant Vermont map.  We crawled around the state, found Shelburne and tried to each stand in a different town.

Zones of Regulation

Our guidance counsel, Katie Tyler, visits our classroom once a week with a focus on learning the "zones of regulation."  We have learned the names and characteristics of the emotions we may feel.  We have also learned a way to categorize these emotions, into "zones":
blue -feeling sad or tired
green-ready to learn, calm and happy
yellow-silly, loss of some control, frustrated
red-out of control, angry, mad

Measuring During Math

We have been measuring the perimeter of shapes using Unifix cubes.  We have also made our own measuring tools to take measurements of objects in our classroom.