Every week, our school community gathers for Community Meeting, where we reflect on our Quaker values and share time together in the manner of a Quaker meeting. Recently, when we started reflecting on Peace, I changed the format of Community Meeting. Our habit in Community Meeting was to have a discussion and then a query,…
Team Time is a weekly event when teams made up of students from different classrooms and grades come together for fun, friendly competition and time together. Sometimes it is hard to find an activity that works for all ages in the team, but this week’s activity worked! For this week’s team time, students had the challenge…
Math class is the first academic subject of the day, and in my class, we always try to start with a brain teaser of some kind. Some weeks, it’s a form of equation construction that the kids can each approach on their own level, such as ___ x ____ = 15. The two missing terms…
To culminate our unit on narrative writing we wrote “small moment stories” which were detailed true stories from our own lives. To cap this off, my class had a writing celebration and invited family and friends to join us for a reading. The process leading up to the celebration – choosing a story, revising,…
With less than a month left of school, I am beginning to reflect on the year. My class is truly feeling like a family unit, and we are all getting sentimental and appreciating our time together. By this time of year the students know all the classroom procedures and routines and can independently execute…
There are many benefits to our small class size and small school. Students receive constant attention and feedback from their teachers. Learning is customized to suit the abilities and interests of each student. And there is a family feel to the school that results in many friendships across grade levels. But there are some…