This week in Alpha…
Pickles gets a kiss from a new friend!
Welcome to Alpha’s 2024-2025 Year!
What a whirlwind of a week! Our first week is a blur of procedures and routines but through it all we are getting to know each other, getting to know our space, and getting to know how we want to make our room the best room it can be. We learned how important listening is when we are all together in a big group – we played “Guess the Leader!” We also had a very inspiring discussion about how people can hurt bodies and feelings. We made two long lists of things that we did NOT want in our class and we performed a funeral for them to banish them from our room.
We also…
- went on a tour of our school…
- met many of our families through our Family Photos…
- formed practice-table teams and learned table-team jobs…
This table team decides jobs using the old “rock, paper, scissors” strategy!
- made an Alphabet Frieze with our table team…
- worked on collaging our Projects and Practice folders…
- creating our Quarter 1 self-portraits
This week in Language Arts…
Because of our first-week schedules, our small groups were shorter this week than usual. We were able to get familiar with our routines…
Ms. Eliza’s group…
We read Peanut Butter and Cupcake, a story about making friends and we read the magical journey of Harold and the Purple Crayon one of Ms. Eliza’s favorite books, when she was in kindergarten. We each got to have a purple crayon and take our own journeys with our imaginations.
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We met our book baskets and learned that ELA stands for English Language Arts. The “language” part is where we are gonna practice how we take in and put out our thoughts and information through reading and writing.
When we speak and people don’t understand us, we can try again to make them understand – but when we write, we don’t get that chance. Alphas thought of all the things that confuse readers, like, different languages, scribbly writing, weird spelling. So we agreed that in order to help readers read our thoughts we owe it to them to spell well and write clearly. It takes some hard work and practice, which isn’t always easy. We got our Dr. Brainy and checked out where we were going to do all this work and where this frustration might come from and how we might be able to work through it! We also read and wrote some too :)
This week in Math…
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We met our calendar, trapped dice, and played “Race to the Top.” We talked about “sorting” and looked at how Ms. Eliza and I sorted our room. We also talked about how our brains LEARN!
Ms. Eliza’s group…
Prepared our math journals for the year, talked and wrote about numbers in each of our lives, and started thinking about what we know about the number ten.
In STEAM…
This week’s challenge was to build a tower out of paper and masking tape with friends…
We learned many hands make light work! And look how tall it is…it takes 4 people to hold it up!
What does that tell you?
Stabilizers and teamwork got ‘er done!
This team worked to build a wide base before building UP! Way to work together!
In other news…
