Dear Families,

The past two weeks have been rich with all sorts of activities. Winter Fridays continues to be an exciting source of fun and mind enriching activities for all. The children enjoyed Shakespeare so very much. Everyone worked hard, while having fun, to prepare for Thursday night’s performance, and what a wonderful performance by the K/1 class and the entire school. We managed to have plenty of time for other activities as well. Here are some highlights:

Language Arts
There has been an explosion of writing in the classroom. The children are enjoying using sound writing and/or dictation to express themselves through poetry. They finished writing about winter and everyone shared his/her poems with joy and pride. This week the children turned their attention to the frogs and brainstormed words to describe the frogs and their activities. Then each child found a place in the classroom to quietly write poems about our frogs. The children love to hear me read their poems out loud and I derive great joy in reading them in the voice of poetry.

Science
Our science teacher Emily helped the children conduct an experiment with eggs. Each child placed an egg in a cup full of vinegar then over a period of a few days watched the chemical reaction. The children made observational drawings and writing of the process. The children were very excited to observe the egg shells dissolve in the vinegar. And because children love to use all of their senses to experience science, they were given the opportunity to remove the eggs from the vinegar and touch, feel, and smell them. You can imagine the excitement – their joyful laughter could be heard all the way down the hall. (It was worth the mess!!!) The children are now conducting their own experiments – some egg yolks were placed back in vinegar, one yolk is being observed drying on aluminum foil, and membrane peels have been carefully placed on the science table to dry. So far, the children have been able to brainstorm some of their findings using descriptive words. We are using the words in language arts for lessons in reading and writing.

First Grade Math
Our mathematicians are enjoying exploring their calendars. They look forward everyday to keeping track of days, number of days in a week, number of weeks in a month, number of weeks in a year (still working on this), and figuring out the number of school days in various ways – for example, last week they broke it down into fives and ones. This week the children enjoyed free choice math. Among the choices, several chose to create and solve addition problems challenging themselves with “big” numbers, others chose to explore multiplication.

Kindergarten Math by Lynne
The Kindergarten math group has been counting and measuring a wide variety of classroom materials. We counted 700 unifix cubes by making towers of 10 and combining the towers. We also learned that 700 unifix cubes equal 43 floor tiles and 43 rulers. The children have been filling in large masking tape shapes on the block rug with unit blocks and counting the number of shapes used. They have also measured different body parts with string and used the length to make towers of unifix cubes. We were able to see who had the longest leg, arm and other body parts. We are now comparing lengths of names and weighing objects to determine which ones are heavy or light.

Reminder – please send in a complete change of clothes for your child if needed, to be kept in your child’s box on top of his/her cubby.

I will be at a meditation retreat next weekend and will not be checking my email. The next update will be the weekend of February 9, but please feel free to contact me during the week. We will begin our unit on birds this coming week. For now I wish you well.
Liliana