Thank you parents for all of your help in creating a really nice Holiday Celebration for the kids. Things ran really smoothly and it great that the kids will have two terrific keepsakes going forward.
We completed our Enchanted Lands project this week and the final pieces are terrific. We first explored the idea of background, midground, and foreground through classic pieces of art. Then we played a game in which students drew images matched to magical elements, they identified.
Their understanding was then leveraged to create art that included painting a setting and collaging. (Incidentally, thanks for all of the magazines!)
Students shared five pieces of candy, from their Halloween trick-or-treating, and created scaled bar graphs with it. In this case students identified categories for their x-axis and an interval of 2 to 5 for their y-axis. Lots of learning and lots of fun.
We completed our first Pro Se Court of the school year. Our judges had to adjudicate whether gum should or should not be allowed in schools. My favorite part is the terrific writing student produce, having rehearsed with the evidence.
The weather was much better than expected and this helped create a really nice field trip experience for the students.
Our focus was on finding arthropods and learning more about these invertebrates. Students shook trees, lifted rocks, dug holes and enlisted parent chaperones in their search. Consequently, they found insects, arachnids, myriapods, and crustaceans.
Thanks parents for the help and the photos!
It took several lessons but students finished their comic book covers. To get us there we studied several classic pieces of art through an instructional approach titled “careful observation.” We learned about silhouettes, types of shapes and lines, and the importance of have a backstory before drawing.
Students also learned different strategies for using water colors. This culminated in what you see below: a lot of great art!
It was a great first week of the 2019-2020 school year. We managed to get a lot done including establishing a number of important routines and navigating a lot of challenging content. We started our work with multiplication and division, described part of the scientific process, learned how to participate in a Readers Workshop and Writers Workshop, and did our first art lesson. Below, the highlights.
The last week of the school year included a lot of academics, our Field Day, and some celebrating. It was a terrific year and one of my favorites professionally. The end was paradoxical in which I certainly looked forward to a break but I didn’t look forward to saying goodbye to 22 terrific students.
With five days left in the year, we participated in a discussion strategy we really like, a Pro Se Court. Over the last two weeks, we read and annotated four articles about zoos, their benefits and their challenges. Students were then divided into three groups. A third were the plaintiffs, a third as defendants, and a third as our judges.
Students didn’t know which role they would be assigned which is important insofar as understanding perspective taking. That said, our seven judges ruled 6-1 in favor of our plaintiffs who argued zoos are bad.
Over and over again the 3rd grader teachers were told the following from the O’Gara staff, “These are great kids!” It’s true, they are.
Room 360 