Hello St Croix families,
It continues to be a great pleasure and a learning
experience for us to be with your children! Recently, we have had moments when, as adults, we were moved by their acts of forgiveness, their honesty in helping
each other and their openness to share their struggles. :)
First a few housekeeping items and updates:
1.
All Lower
Elementary families are getting this same message:
We are writing to communicate
about celebrating Halloween at school. We will be doing harvest related
activities with the children on Tuesday, October 31st. These will
vary from classroom to classroom, but all will involve some fun, hands-on
activities and experiences to celebrate this time of year. Some classrooms may
do activities with the Upper Elementary students who will be doing
presentations on famous individuals and biography stories.
We would like to
request the following from you:
-
Please do not send the children in costumes;
regular school dress is expected
-
Please do not send candy to school in lunch
boxes or as gifts to share both on Halloween or in the following days
Thank you for your cooperation.
2.
All Lower Elementary families also received this
message from Jean Peters, the Elementary Program Director about snack
reimbursement:
Dear
Elementary Families
We
have a historical practice at Great River to provide snack for lower and upper
elementary students. Generosity of families has been essential to sustaining
this practice over the years. This year, we have a grant that is supporting the
elementary program expansion, and we have recently been informed that a
classroom snack cannot be funded by our grant.
Due
to this adjustment in funding, we will have to adjust the scope of the snack we
can fund in our classrooms. Budget for maximum reimbursement will be set at $30
per week. If you are able to donate your snack contribution, that is sincerely
appreciated by the school
The
goal of classroom snack is to bind the community together through shared
responsibility for practical life. And, an outcome of the snack is that
students learn these food preparation skills and the necessity of food
preparation for the community.
3. St Croix Update about
afternoon snack.
We
have decided that when students come to us in the afternoon and tell us that
they are hungry, we are going to allow them to have a piece of fruit. You will
see our wonderful fruit basket in one of the pictures below. We will try to
always ask you for fresh or dried fruit so we can fill this hunger need. If a
piece of fruit does not fully meet the hunger need, we can invite them to see
if there is anything else in their lunch boxes. However, thus far, a piece of
fruit is doing the trick.
4.
We want to remind you that students should not
bring items ( toys, stuffed animals, jewelry,
etc) from home to school. These just end up distracting them or causing
squabbles about why some get to bring these items. Even having an item in the back
pack ( outside the classroom) is hard for the students because they know it is
there and they want to get it. We want to avoid putting them in a position of
being sneaky J Thank
you for reminding your child to keep the backpack free of items from home other
than weather related clothes, lunch box, folder and school related materials.
5.
We would like to ask that you please write your
child’s name or the last name (if it’s going to be a hand-me-down) in clothes
that come to school. Now, in the Elementary building we have a HUGE stack of
lost and found clothes. We want your children to build both the responsibility
of keeping track of their personal items and appreciation for the fact that
they have their clothing needs meet by you.
6.
As you may have heard from your children, we did
have to remove a few items from the classroom since they were not being
respected. The most coveted is the plush chair in the library area. The most
important part of the lesson of removal that we thoroughly explained to them
was this: even if a student didn’t misuse or mistreat the chair, they too had
to bear the consequences of the chair being removed because we are a community.
We want the students to learn that within a community, our individual decisions
impact others. This realization not only builds accountability to the group, but
also encourages the children to help each other make good decisions themselves instead of
that directive always coming from an adult. Think of it as “positive peer
pressure”; it’s very effective and real. We are happy to report that the absence of
this item has made them reflect on their roles in their community and that the chair will be returning
soon, as we can see they are getting close to being ready.
7.
Our wonderful classroom Ambassador brought us
our fish for our beautiful tank. They students were thrilled! Thank you
Rachael.
8.
Library Books: Rachael also set up a Sign up
Genius for library books. If you can take turns each week to get about 12-14
books maximum, that would be great. For whatever electronic reason, we cannot see the Sign
Up Genius document, so we never know who has signed up. If you have signed up,let us know and we will email you topics and themes for the books. Finally, we have a blue
duffel bag for the books and we will pass that to you ahead of your turn, so you
can use it to carry them.
Now, for our classroom news:
We gave the Second Great Lesson this past Thursday morning.
It is called “The Coming of Life.” It recounts the beginning of life on Earth;
how many millions and millions of years ago that was, the types of life that developed
and finally, the important scientific fact that life started in the water. We
had specimens from many of the Geological eras (mainly Paleozoic and Mesozoic) such
as a sponge, coral, sea urchin, star fish and sand dollars, cockroaches, millipedes
and other arthropods, shark teeth etc. They really enjoyed seeing all these
items and learning how life on Earth has evolved and developed in the 4.5 billion
years of the Earth’s history. We discussed how some species have gone extinct
and are only visible in fossils.
You will see a few pictures of our Art Teacher, Jenny who
continues to teach them calligraphy every other week with black ink and a
fountain pen. Soon, we will have a follow up work in our classroom using a
calligraphy pen and black ink. Also, you will see pictures from our weekly park
visits. The students really benefit from this time- as much physically as
socially. We see lots of new friendships develop during this time. And, they
have tons of fun discovering and expanding their physical coordination on the great park
equipment.
Also, you will see pictures from our Field trip to Buttermilk
Farms. Only a few students from the St. Croix classroom were in Kateri’s group
so unfortunately, we only have a few pictures of our students here. However, we
did eat as a class so you can see most of us gathered there. It was a fantastic trip.
Lessons and work have
been doing:
Math and Geometry:
- Types of triangles
-Pattern work
-Addition, subtraction and multiplication from 1- 4 places
-Numerical Hierarchies ( We call them families and they all have units,
tens and hundreds in the family: Simple family, Thousands family, Millions
family, Billions family, Trillions family, etc… We call this the Infinity Street
lesson and each hierarchical family lives on the street that never ends and
each has a “driveway” (the ‘comma’ that separates the “houses” ie: 1,000,000 =
the Millions family
-Factions and Clock work
Practical Life and
Art:
-Shoe tying
-Folding plastic bags
-Zipping, buttoning, folding clothes
-Peeling and cutting vegetables
-Free and fixed colorings
-Sewing and more sewing – they all LOVE this ( we do have our Handwork teacher,
Karen who rotates with our Art teacher in Tuesday afternoons, however, we don’t
have any pictures of those sessions. You will though see the their careful
handwork efforts in the take home folders.
-Crocheting lessons
-Origami
Music and Peace
Education
We have a new clean up song: it’s in French and we are
teaching it to the students.
We also have been practicing making Silence. We sit still
and watch a candle for a minute. This helps them center themselves and start their
day calmly.
Cosmic Education:(
history, geography and the sciences)
-The Second Great Lesson : the Coming to Life ( history of how life
started on Earth and the evolution of various species
-Compass directions
-Latitude/ Longitude; Equator and Prime Meridian
-Hemispheres
-The order of the planets
-North America: the countries that make it up; some individual country
research (Canada and/or Mexico) and some research on animals of the continent.
- Land and water forms: island/lake; cape/ bay
Reading/ Writing
-Cursive – most all the students love to practice- its really quite
endearing :0
-Phonograms/ Spelling: double “e”; “ ea” ; “ ai”
-Sight words ( non-phonetic words ) such as the, he, because etc
- short and long vowels; blending and reading aloud to a teacher from phonetic
readers
Our Read Aloud Book:
“The Adventures of Toad” from The Wind in the Willows. We will finish soon and begin another
book.
As we mentioned in our last blog entry, every child has not
had lessons and practice on all of these items, but all children have had some of these
lessons. Finally, we want to close with a reminder to sign up for a conference in November if you have not already. And, every Wednesday afternoons we have Office hours every from 3:05 to 4pm. If you would like to see your child’s math, language and science copybooks which have most of their lessons in them, or discuss anything else, we are always there until 4pm. If you need us to stay later to accommodate your work schedule, please email us and we can change the Office hours for you that week. Just so you know, we will be showing you all their copybooks during our conference time.
