Creating Together

"I want to use the liccorice for an arch."

"Okay, where do you want to put it?"

"Right here in the front."

"Can we put it against the house to help it balance?"

"Yeah. That looks great!"

Our older class helped our younger class make graham cracker gingerbread houses this past week. It was a wonderful collaboration. For our older kids, it was a lesson in how to help and not just do it themselves. We talked ahead of time about how to make sure that we were letting the younger kids lead the creative process and the actual work. With a few reminders, they did manage to listen, support, and ask the right questions. The knowledge that they would get to make their own houses this next week may have made it easier, but I was very proud of them in their roles as facilitators.

Morgan's PK and K Class

*Graphed our favorite Thanksgiving foods. Many kids said it was hard to pick just one!

*Explored coffee grounds, kinetic sand, water colors, and oil pastels.

*"Plucked the turkey" by putting feathers in a strainer then pulling the feathers out.

*Played mancala, ABC bingo, roll dice and graph the number, and geo boards!

*Created our "thankful turkeys", turkey handprints, turkey puppets, look-n-find Thanksgiving pictures. 

*Created our ginger bread houses.

*Took turns dressing the Country Classroom goose with many different outfits. 

*Used Bingo dabbers to find the letters in our names. 

*Did some Thanksgiving poems, books, songs, and large movement dancing. 

*Took care of dolls and made food for each other with play food, drove around the city map with cars.

*Went on a "big foot hunt" with a parent volunteer. The children looked for scratch marks on trees and on the ground, listened to different nature sounds, etc. They seemed to enjoy the adventure. 

*Played and made lots of cooking and potions with nature items outside. 

Tracy's 1st-4th Class

In math, we all spent some time sorting polygons by their attributes. We talked about how a rectangle is a parallelogram, but a parallelogram is not a rectangle, and used Venn Diagrams to help us keep everything in order. All the grades were working on "What's My Rule," aka function problems, this week. The second grade class is working on developing subtraction strategies. The fourth graders tackled lines of symmetry and fractions.

In literacy, we talked about prefixes and suffixes and used them to help us figure out the meaning of some unknown words. For all the kids who have finished the final draft of their story, they are free writing which includes writing more stories, writing about weapons, making maps of underground treasure troves, and writing letters to friends.