A Crisp Fall Day

We had a wonderful day in the woods on Wednesday!  We went to our new outdoor classroom and spent the afternoon exploring and playing with friends.

This is what kids had to say about their day:

Here we are hiking to our classroom.

 There were a lot of happy friends having fun together today!

Happy New Year!

Even though we had a 2 hour delay yesterday, we were still able to get into the woods for an hour and a half.  It was a balmy, beautiful 26 degrees out.  None of us were cold, everyone has gotten so good at wearing layers, warm socks, and packing their bags with extra mittens. 

 

Here are some of the journal entries from our morning outside.

"I was playing with friends."

"I am playing cops and robbers."  Notice this friend using the -ing ending in the word playing.

"Look at the kids play raptors."  Raptors was a very popular game this week.  This friend has great spaces between his words and a period at the end of the sentence.

"I played Paw Patrol with my friends."  This was the other popular game of the week.  Do you notice the speech bubble by the kid on the branch?  It says, "Landon, look at me."  What a great detail in her writing!

October 29-November 2

In Reading Workshop we have been reading and rereading Star Books.  These books have good story lines and many of them are classics, you might remember them from your own childhood.  Titles include: Caps For Sale, Harry the Dirty Dog, Corduroy, and many fairy and folk tales.  We've been retelling them, both by ourselves and with our reading partners.  When reading we look at the pictures, make our words match what's happening in the pictures, use character voices and exact words, like "Trip trap, trip trap, who's that tripping over my bridge?"

Have your children told you about our worm bin?  Two years ago one of my students noticed a problem in our classroom.  He noticed that we were throwing a lot of food scraps away and thought we should be composting them instead.  He wrote a letter to Mr. Keith and Mr. Hall stepped in and invited a local vermicomposter to our school.  Since then we've had our own worm bin in the classroom.  We save our fruit and vegetable waste and feed the worms once a week.  When it's time, we sift out the rich vermicompost from the worms and use it in our school garden.

Feeding the worms is a huge motivator for eating fresh fruit and vegetable snacks.  Kids mark a counter on a 10 frame whenever they have fruit or veggies for their snack.  During the month of October we made an amazing 237 counters!