I loved seeing the excited faces of our dressed-up students this week! Thank you for the hard work you did as parents - I was so impressed by the costumes!
This week, in addition to all the fun crazies, we also learned! This week was a good foundational week for us, focusing on math, literacy, and socio-emotional learning. We also learned about the why of Easter - bunnies and spring and pastel-coloured eggs are fun, but they are not what brings meaning to the holiday.
As we studied Easter, we continuously returned to the theme of God's never-ending, never-giving up, always and forever love. We learned that love, not nails, held Jesus there in His pain and sorrow. I saw the tender hearts of your children toward Christ as we walked through the stories of Passion Week. We also celebrated the risen King - the reason for our joy and hope today.
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| This co-created mural helped to cement many things. We synergized (Habit 6) to make it together, and we explored art techniques, using sponges, straws, and brushes for different effects. As students painted, I narrated the Easter story - the ultimate expression of Jesus' love for us - it was fascinating to see students emotions come out in their choices, and in some of the symbols. While difficult to find unless you know what you're looking for, students expressed their ideas of things like the tomb, a disciple, and a heart. |
We also had practice in our socio-emotional decisions. Weeks like Spirit Week are so fun, but lead to very tired students. This in turn (just as it does in adulthood), makes it harder to truly listen to eachother and work together. We turned this into a learning opportunity this week... taking time to explore our misunderstandings and "trying again" - using our habits to repeat the situation in a more helpful/kinder way. When this is done, it opens the door for Habit 6 Synergize - Together truly is better!
We could then have fun with things like eating at a restaurant (this was great for number skills and communication skills and etiquette).
KI problem-solved to make a tall tower (he figured out that if he took off the chimney, made it bigger, and then added it back to the house, he could make it taller than if he tried to build up block by block!)
In math, we focused on measuring time. Students learned how to put things in order (first, next, last), and how to decide if something is short or long. Progressing there from student interest, we looked at how to tell time on a clock (by the hour).
One of our favourite activities was to see how many times we could write our name - first during a short song, then a long song. We found out that we could write more with longer songs. In addition to practice writing their names, students practiced number formation and number sense, and oral communcation skills and they came up to explain their work.
This week, we worked hard on stretching out words (phoneme segmentation: cat becomes /c/-/a/-/t/). We used playdough to act out the way we use our mouth to hear the different sounds.
We used playdough for letter making too!
And one of the most fun things - Scrabble Day! First of all, we needed to have a lesson on vowels - we can't make words without them! ET provided the E, but we needed stand in paper for the other vowels. And then we created!
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| JAM |
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| HOG |
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| SOCK - we also learned that sometimes letters work together in pairs, like "CK" - we showed that by linking arms! |
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| Battleship Instructions |
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