YAY the BLOG is HERE!!

Happy October, Alpha Families- and a big HOORAY for the blog being up and running. It will probably take us a while to get used to this new format, so thanks in advance for your patience!

As we careen towards the close of this quarter, our class has been wildly gathering information, sharing artifacts and creating connections with their classmates through their exploration of community. We have had a great time getting to know one other while also learning about animal communities that call Texas “home”.  Collaboration in a progressive classroom involves building trust among each other. We do this through games and activities that get all of us working together in pairs and small groups. These activities help build a sense of inclusion.  To read more about the approach we’re using check out this site.

Alphas working together in pairs by creating a drawing holding only one marker together:

Our reflections afterward? “It was hard!”, “He let me be the leader so I liked it”, “I got to know my partner better”, ” We didn’t want to do it so we made a different drawing!”

Alpha students enjoyed sharing all they’re learning about the life of their Texas animal. We’ve been amazed watching videos of their eating habits. Who knew a golden eagle could kill a wolf?

We’re beginning to create stories for our puppet shows.  It’s exciting to watch 5, 6 and
7-year-olds tackle such a big project. It’s one thing to identify parts of a story, and quite another thing to create them!

 

This week we read 8 minutes by ourselves!

We’ve been very interested to learn math facts, so we got out some fun dice games to practice adding.  One neat strategy for building number awareness is through learning “doubles,” like 4+4 and 7+7.  Knowing “doubles” makes it easier to learn other number combinations like 7+8 or 4+5.

 

We created story problems to put our math facts to practical use.  One of our students described an elaborate scenario that involved 5 U.S. A. soccer players and 3 German soccer players and how all 8 of them could eventually play on the same team!  Some students were so inspired by their story problems they are working on a play!

We’d like to give a big shout out to Gabriella (Pavla’s mama)- for helping tidy up our room on Thursday afternoon, Caleb (Marley’s papa)- for putting in a new shelf in our teacher closet, Stacie (Kellen and Evan’s mama)- for leading us in yoga, and to Hannah (Coppie and Estee’s mama)- for helping us in the classroom!