This week in Our Big Backyard…
This week we expanded the circle of our community from Hyde Park to ALL of the neighborhoods in the Austin area. We explored maps that cartographers made to see where we all live. We all drew a portrait of our homes.
Then we considered…what do neighbors do for one another? Some of our ideas and experiences are that neighbors help, protect and have barbecues. We thought about all of the jobs and helpers in our community…firefighters, trash collectors, police officers, mail carriers, doctors, nurses, teachers, bus drivers, etc. Then we made our Peeps!
A peep is a small person who we’ll be having experiences with all year.
Then we talked about all of the places where we go in our community. Shoe stores, hospitals, schools, parks and playgrounds, restaurants, ice cream stores, and bakeries to name a few. Each team picked a place to make for the Peep’s neighborhood, designed it and constructed it…
a library…with a parking lot!
a restaurant…
a school…
an ice cream shop…
& a bakery!
We were excited to have a visit from Anna’s Owa, Kathy, who is a Nurse Physician and Scientist in our community. She shared with us how germs spread with a magic lotion that, in the dark, with a black light, illuminated the germs on our hands! Holy Moly did they spread around easily even onto books that we touched!! Lots of handwashing ensued while singing 2 rounds of happy birthday!
Circle Time Reflections…
This week we talked about our class agreements, but we also began to reflect on some of the real struggles we can face in a community. We talked about what it might mean when someone is crying. There could be lots of reasons (“maybe they’re scared,” “they might miss their mom,” “maybe they fell out of that tree on the playground,”) – but we all agreed that none of them were good feelings and that whoever was crying was not okay. We talked about what we could do in that situation. Many Alphas came up with lots of great ideas that showed that they cared and were curious about solving problems. Then we asked if it was pleasant to listen to crying, or if it was easy to help people all the time- no, not all the time, it can be hard. We all need to be sad sometimes and we all know it can be really difficult to find the right words to explain how we are feeling. It is hard to go through hard times with friends. We were happy to put a leaf on the tree for members of our community who are persevering through things that are difficult for them and make them cry sometimes as they are learning to find their words AND a leaf for the members of our community who have taken time to care for them and show them kindness.
This week in Language Arts…
Ms. Eliza’s group…
Our study of the alphabet started with the letter Mm. We’re learning that letter sounds become words, words become sentences and sentences become books or things we say.
In writing, we talked about how illustrations often come from our imaginations, we learned a way to draw mice, and spiders and are seeing the value of labeling our drawings. Learning drawing techniques gives early writers the opportunity to express themselves and their own experiences. We shared all of our P&P journal reflections about Hyde Park.
We began to practice sharing and appreciating each other’s work.
Ms. Eliza brought in her grandmother’s big ‘ole dictionary to see how many words can be made out of the just 26 letters of our English alphabet!!
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We shared our Journals…
We reviewed vowel sounds “o,u,e” and wrote CVC words in their new class composition books…
We talked about the Outside and Inside traits of the main characters in the books we’ve read…
This week in Math…
Ms. Kim’s Group…
Math is about problem-solving. Learning about patterns is a way to help us train our brains for problem-solving! This week we played with more patterns: literally! We got out rhythm sticks every day and repeated patterns we heard. We found patterns in our calendar “The days repeat over and over and over again.” Alphas met probably the oldest known A/B pattern known to humankind: Day and Night!
The candle represents the Sun and let’s pretend that we are the Earth and all of us live right on your belly!
Is it day or night? “NIGHT!”
Wow, the days (and nights go quickly in Alpha!
We started a Day/Night A/B Project…
We played a game that shows another kind of pattern – one that grows, by one: a counting pattern! We played “One More.”
Alphas did a great job taking turns, sharing markers, and showing good sportsmanship!
Ms. Eliza’s group…
We focused on two concepts… odd and even numbers and composing and decomposing shapes through the study of tangrams. When becoming familiar with Tangrams we learned that Liu Hui, a Chinese mathematician, developed them to solve math problems. We discovered that the seven shapes could compose an amazing number of things! Working together in partnerships, we solved tangram puzzles, and created our own puzzles to swap. This exploration gave us the opportunity to discuss the attributes of triangles, squares and parallelograms with questions like…what makes a square square? How is a square different from a parallelogram if they both have 4 sides? What strategies did you use to solve these puzzles? What clues did you notice? What made solving them challenging?
solving puzzles designing puzzles
We reviewed odd and even numbers; we asked ourselves what makes a number even or odd? We noted that no matter how many digits there are in a number, the value of the last (or one’s place) has the power to make it odd or even.
In STEAM…
Our challenge was to build a bridge out of paper and tape that could hold one or more peeps. Some teams used knowledge they’ve built from previous challenges “we added some stabilizers”, “we built in some support”…
Some bridges were hanging structures, some stood on pillars…
In other news…
Our first birthday of the year!
Our first “Hallelujah Plate” this year!
