Being that it’s poetry month, my Kindergarten-first grade class started reading more poetry over the past two weeks and we have started writing our own poems! The kids are so creative and motivated, it’s a treat to see. We started with acrostic poems. Acrostic poems are very concrete and accessible for students writing at all…
We start every day with Morning Meeting, where kids greet each other, share news, go over the day’s schedule and calendar and settle into the day. A couple weeks ago, I hung up a sign-up sheet for students interested in leading Morning Meeting. I put up nine slots (every Friday for the next nine weeks),…
In social studies this year, we have been learning about the history of Chicago, using machines as a lens to guide us. Recently, we studied the Great Chicago Fire. Students were fascinated with learning about the second star on the Chicago flag and one of the reasons Chicago is nicknamed the “Second City”. I…
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…
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,…
We undertook one of my favorite school traditions this week. Students and teachers made the forty-minute walk to our sister organization – the Quaker senior community at the Admiral at the Lake. We have come to recognize many of the landmarks on this walk. We pass the Thorndale L station, a hub for our community…