Ten minutes before dismissal today, I was down in my office in the basement when suddenly I heard footsteps clattering into my office. Renata poked her head in: “You are cordially invited to a musical mask march, upstairs, right now!” Who could resist such an invitation, especially at the end of a long day? Upstairs our…
Students in Middle School are learning about their connection to the world. Events take place around them, or to them, and understanding that they have control over these forces is new. In my 5-6th grade class, we try to leverage this desire to connect whenever we can. We use it in Social Studies for students…
Last week, two of the classes trekked it in the snow to read to our neighborhood preschool, Families Together. We try to do this about four times a year. I began reflecting on why we do this to help explain to our students and concluded this reflection after our experience. Here are some thoughts I…
This year, our whole school instructional theme is circles, and this month all class levels have been studying the circles of Solar System in science. Each class is doing some research, making a model of some form, and learning facts about the solar system’s objects and their movement, each in a developmentally appropriate way. In…
Every since we came back to school in January, my class has been thinking about writing stories. We started with a diagram Michael came up with, showing a story’s beginning, middle, and end as the food going into a duck, the food being digested, and the food coming out the other end. Everyone loved the…
My second grade students have been recently introduced to the concept of research, and began a preliminary process in both Writing and Science last week. In Writing, students are writing non-fiction information texts, or “All-About” books. In order to learn more about their topic, students have borrowed books from our classroom library and I have…