Most of the Field Museum’s collection is in the basement. There are almost 20 million taxidermied animal specimens in their collection. A few thousand are on display. Every artifact that reaches the floor represents a choice. It was chosen as an important piece of our natural history that deserves to be seen and studied. The…
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…
In my classroom, we are well and truly launched on creating our own worlds! As a culmination of our Earth science unit, our literature studies, and our social studies emphasis this year on government circles of influence, responsibility and authority, each student in our class is designing a world of their own. There are four…