Laurel Creek Blog - Week 22

Hard to believe that we just completed week 22! Over the course of the 5 days we did a lot of reading and writing (book time, News, small moments), discussed kindness and teasing, figured out a way to count all of our pockets, made spiced cider with Ella's mom, met with our Strawberry Creek buddies, and missed Lyssa :(

As usual, our week began with Julianne coming in to make art with us.  Students created black and white paper constructions.  The simplicity of the process coupled with the structural complexity of their resulting piece was very exciting to the children and many of them wanted to create another.    

Community Meeting 
We were visited by Kate and a group of 4th and 5th graders to talk about teasing.  The older children role-played while we watched and responded.  We followed up the activity by reading How Full is  Your Bucket for Kids, in which we are asked to consider what fills our bucket and what we can do to fill the buckets of others.  (In this book everyone is imagined to have a bucket above their head and when we are treated kindly or when we do kind things to others  our bucket fills.  When we are mistreated our buckets spills out.)
It was a memorable visual for the children and something to which they could strongly connect.      

Student News 
Everyone wrote about the news from their lives.  We are now transitioning to a differently formatted paper as students are becoming increasingly prolific in their writing.     

Writing Small Moments
Our curent writing focus is finding a small episode from our life, zooming in on it and drawing out the details.  So rather than simply writing, "I had a play date with my friend.  We went to the park."  They would be challenged to home in on one small event during the play date, for instance: "On my playdate we went to the park and dug in the sand.  We found insects below the ground and they tried to crawl on my hands."   

*At this point our camera experienced a "lens error" and inexplicably stopped working.  The following day it began working again, just as inexplicably. 


Book Time
Independent reading of "just right" books

Partner reading

Bead chain work
Nancy was in again on Thursday to guide a group of students through work on their bead chains.  A montessori material, bead chains support the development of basic numeration skills like counting and one-to-one correspondence and then scales up to concretize higher level skills like counting on, skip counting, and multiplication. 

Another Math work

Calendars
Students created their February calendars where all the important dates for the month are collected.  These will come home with them on Monday. 

Sundry student creations  

Harry Potter glasses

A beach tableau 

 

paper constructions 

Working together during a Readers Workshop choice

Partner reading with Buddies
We ended the week with our buddies from Strawberry Creek.  Laurel Creek students picked out books from our library and read them with their buddies.  The emphasis was on selecting books that they have been interested in but that were beyond their reading level. 

As 4th/5th grade students read from a book, Laurel creek students acted out the words. 

Have a lovely weekend!

Ben & Lyssa