Nature Scavenger Hunt

Dear Families,
On Fridays, Team Harmony's students participate in workshops.  The teachers on Harmony offer different learning activities for the children.  Sometimes the activities are directly related to what our learning themes are; sometimes they are related to seasons or school-related events.  We love science explorations on Team Harmony so this week, I offered the students a Nature Scavenger Hunt.
The kids sign up for the workshops and we allow 6 students per workshop.  These workshops allow the students to learn in a multi-age setting with students from all of our classrooms on Harmony as we mix the kids up.  We love workshops.  Here are some pictures from my workshop this week.  The students were challenged to follow the alphabet and find nature-related objects or living things for each letter of our alphabet.  We almost found one item per letter....If only we had had more time......The students used their scientific observations skills, magnifying glasses and each other to make observations.  We had a great time together.

Greetings

Every day, we start our morning with a special greeting.  A student is "the greeter" and chooses a greeting from our big basket of greetings.  We have already tried the Name and Animal Greeting, The Shoe Greeting and the Snow-ball Greeting.  Ask your child to explain.  Here is a picture from our Snowball Greeting.

More pictures from our first week of school

Dear Families,
I wanted to share some more pictures from our first week of school.
The students worked so hard on following our school rules-being safe, kind and responsible-this week.  They earned many buzzies.  We work as a team to fill our classroom jar.  Although we did not fill the jar this week, we filled it more than half-way!!  The kids earned an extra recess for that.  If your child did not already tell you, I wanted to let you know that our school has brand new buzzies this year but they are a little smaller.  Hence, it will take a little longer to fill the classroom (and school) jar.  The kids did a great job showing kindness, safety and responsibility this week.

Weekly Update

Dear Families,
We are off to a fantastic start in first and second grade.  What a terrific group of kids I have this year.  It is like they have known each other for a long time and already know our routines!  They are certainly ready to learn and explore together.
We are spending a lot of time building a sense of classroom and school community in our room now.  We follow the Responsive Classroom model at ABS and learn together in a collaborative way.  This week, we got to know each other better through games and different "All About Me' activities.  The students participated in classroom scavenger hunts and a bingo game to get to know each other.  We also read the book "The Kissing Hand" by Audrey Penn and talked about the different feeling we might experience starting school again.  While seeing your friends again is exciting, it can also be scary to join a new classroom with new, unfamiliar faces and people.  We also talked about special people in our lives, and the students started writing about someone who is very special to them.  They were also encouraged to expand their thinking and think about why this person is special and show that in words and pictures.  The students also received their writing folders and we started decorating them.  We look forward to sharing these special writing pieces with you when they are done!  We will keep you posted.

The students and I also created a Classroom Contract and brainstormed what it means to be safe, kind and responsible in our class and at our school.  The students had great ideas and we came up with terrific guidelines, such as "use kind and polite words, calm bodies and show respect to all".  I am so proud of them.  We wrote our rules together on our new smartboard and will post these when we all done.  The students also started their self-portrait, which will hang around our Classroom Contract.  Our theme this year is "We all "Bee-long".  We will continue to talk about belonging, trust and a sense of community throughout the year.

The students also started to explore our classroom library this week.  Every day, we have a read aloud; a time when the children listen to a story read by me, or someone else (sometimes we have mystery readers and surprise guests who do these read alouds!) Today, for example, we read the book "Miss Rumphius" by Barbara Cooney.  In this book, the main character has to fulfill three things in her life, one being finding a way to make the world a more beautiful place to live in.  We discussed what we can do to make the world a more beautiful place.  The kids had great ideas again.  Some students wanted to pick up trash, while others wanted to teach everyone to read and write.  Some students wanted to plant more flowers and trees while others wanted to focus on conservation and recycling!  As you can see, these wonderful first and second graders have very powerful ideas.

The students also had their first math class today.  Ask your child to tell you the different math activities we did.  All first graders on Harmony has math with me.  Second graders in my class go to Ms. Benoit or Ms. Crowley.  We have math every day, but as mentioned in our conferences math homework will not come home every week for first graders. 

Lastly, Thursday folders did not go home today as we don't have that much to send home yet (after all, we have just been in school for 2 days!).  They will, however, come home next week. Thursday folders are due back the following day (ie, Friday).

We will not send home homework folders, math homework and reading logs until the first full week of school.  More information will come next week.

I hope you will have a great evening and day tomorrow.
Enjoy our class collage from our first day of school.

Maria