Classroom News this week! East Classroom Welcome back to school and to 2015! We had a fantastic break and the children seemed to also. They were so excited to see each other and talk about their break. The snow decided to come and with that cold weather. Please remember to label all your winter items. We will go outside when the temperature is above 15 degrees. We are enjoying looking at the beautiful snow from inside in addition to exploring the new work in the classroom. This week we reviewed the classroom rights and responsibilities. We added 2 new maps, Australia and United States, to our map stand. We have created our own snowflakes with coffee filters in art and added the bouncing ball to our movement shelf. The new science unit is the human body. There are many activities the children are using to explore parts of the human body as well as how it works. We added 5 drawers and cards to our geometric cabinet. On the sensorial shelf we are exploring with the pressure cylinders. Kindergartners were given a lesson on nouns with the farm work. The zipping and velcro dressing frame were added to buttoning and snapping. Next week, on Tuesday, we will have our next food preparation of banana slicing. Thank you for the donations. ** Reminder to check your childs cubby for updated clothing. **Remember that MSBG does NOT follow BG City schools for closing and delays. We are our own listing. **Monday starts the SAPP program for 4s and 5s that have turned in the permission slip. West Classroom Welcome back to 2015! We hope everyone had an enjoyable break, we heard many stories from the children! Our windows are being decorated with beautiful snowflakes that the children have cut from coffee filters. They also painted a snowflake at the Easel. Our new science unit is on animal tracks. Our new Sensorial unit is on smelling. Children used their sense of smell to match different scents together and to pictures. In Practical Life, we are practicing how to put on gloves and snow pants for the upcoming winter weather. The kindergartners were all given their first lesson on the farm. This beautiful work allows children to discover and identify different parts of grammar. This week, they were introduced to labeling nouns. Younger children have been receiving lessons from an older child on how to do the farm as well and are excited to explore the work. Happy Birthday Shaarika on January 2! Our classroom is in need of a classroom representative for the remainder of the school year. Contact us if you are interested in volunteering. Thank you! Lower Elementary Welcome back Lower Elementary families! We are off to a busy start this New Year. Lower El children received new lessons in Math this week. We are working with different types of graphs, such as bar, coordinate, and pie graphs. Students are asked to synthesize information to create their own graphs and to use existing graphs for comparisons. We have also been surveying the students to come up with information for whole-class graphs. With the chilly weather to inspire us, we have embarked on a journey to explore the polar regions in Geography. The children are learning about both the Arctic and Antarctic polar regions, differentiating between the two coldest areas on our Earth. Are penguins found primarily in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere? Are there polar bears in Antarctica? Ask your Lower El student to find out! Finally, we would like to extend a warm welcome back to Sam Challu! He returns to Lower South after spending a semester with his family in Mexico City. Upper Elementary This week in Art, we are making paper mache masks. This is for a project about ancient Egypt that we’re doing in class. We are making the school look like a real wax museum! We will do reader’s theater with the masks we made and tell about the Egyptians and Gods we play as. By: Hannah Castor and Zach Schetter Teacher note: The students are currently finishing their 3D maps in the Egyptian simulation. These maps are representations of the area they live on the Nile River. In collaboration with Miss Kelsey, the students will create Egyptian masks. Ask your child about it! :) Middle School Last semester, our humanities studies focused on marginalization and oppression as we explored the ethic of critique. This semester we’ll have a much more positive focus on the ethic of care for the next 13 weeks. In fact, on Monday, the students decided that we, as a nation, are primed to improve our condition. They coined our current era “nation inspiration” as a nod to our ability to overcome obstacles. During the next 13 weeks, we’ll study Native Americans before colonization, the displacement of Native Americans during the 1800s, and the Great Depression. While on the surface those might not sound like the most uplifting moments in our nation’s past, when viewed through a lens of care, they were episodes that highlighted the connectivity of communities. We’ll also be reading John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and completing a personalized research paper. We did some additional career study this week. Students worked together to create a list of personal skills/attributes. The objective was to find at least one word for each letter of the alphabet, but we were able to go well beyond that. Next, we looked at the personality test results from before Winter Break, and applied those results to potentially matching career choices. The site we used had some pretty challenging descriptors of roadblocks each of us face, given our particular personality traits, but many of us found those descriptors to be remarkably accurate. Perhaps this will need some further study! Students combined four chosen attributes they felt they had with the information from the personality tests, to pick their next career to investigate. One of the most difficult things for several of the students was to avoid projecting attributes they’d like to have, in order to legitimize a career choice. Striving toward more patience or to be a star zoology student can be goals, but our current focus is more on the tendencies we have now, and knowing that those tendencies need to be acknowledged if they are to eventually find a career that will be fulfilling. We also began our study of data that will help us to understand how scientists have used evidence of the dynamic changes of Earth’s surface through time, to interpret the geologic record. We started with a study of the similarities of animal tracks, and the identification of commonly found fossils. Students also began a study of the strata (rock layers) of a site in Montana as compared to one in France. We saw that index fossils can be very helpful in making a determination of the age of a layer while on-site at an archeological dig. We will continue our conversations about the geologic record in the coming weeks. Peace PALS Our Peace PALs lesson this week continued our study of caring. Are you a bucket filler or bucket dipper today? https://youtube/watch?v=CIftjwDkztw
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 14:46:44 +0000
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