October 27, 2017

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 31^st. 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiinCxpJxSU

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.