Thursday, April 19, 2012

Back to Blogging!

This is how life should be right?
My oh my, what a busy few weeks it has been! Thank you to everyone who came and enjoyed the projects your children created surrounding our Avenida de la Playa study. Bit by bit they are slowly disappearing into cubbies, book baggies and binders as the room transforms into our next until of study.
On Monday I spoke with the children about our last eight weeks (they do not know it is only eight weeks and I enjoy living in denial) together. Our main focus through out the reminder of the year will be on plants and animals. The children are in control of how we learn about these topics and which group of animals we will study. During the first few days of the week I introduced the children to a different author/illustrator that has created a genre of books that are based on animals (Jan Brett), plants (Saxton Freyman) or both (Eric Carle). During our little author/illustrator preview I spoke with the children about all of the possible activities we could do as well as how each author/illustrator was special. We will make a decision tomorrow and I cannot wait to find out who the children will choose. Who knows, we may learn about all three!
"Mom, can we look for this book after school?"
Our first Preview was with Saxton Freyman who uses fruits and vegetables to create his illustrations. Below I transcribed what the children liked most about him.

I liked how the animals were made of vegetables. –A.K
I liked all about him. -P.R.
I like the octopus and how they are made of banana peels. –V.V.
He used fruit and vegetables as his pictures. –M.C.
I like that he used fruit and vegetables as animals. –R.L.
I liked that the seahorse was made of Chioggia beets. –J.B.
I liked the fruit that he made. –S.P.
I liked the animals names. –N.H.
I liked that the turtle is made out of pineapple. –E.L.
I liked that he had fruits in his books. –J.C.
I like that his dolphins are made out of bananas. –M.B.
I like that he put animals in the book. –K.F.
I like that he used fruits as his animals. –S.Y.
 Our next author/illustrator preview was Jan Brett. We read her story The Mitten and learned about the animal habitats  and her "sneak-a-peek" pages. The children counted the amount of animals that fit into the mitten, tried to fit as many animals as the could into their own mitten and used the sneak-a-peek pages to write about where the various winter animals lived. Below is a video of E.L. trying to fit her animals into her mitten.
"My friends help by playing with me." "I ask them if they are okay when they fall."
 The final author/illustrator we previewed was my favorite of all time... Eric Carle! If I had been lucky enough to grow up with a grandpa, I picture him to be just like Eric Carle. During our reading of House for Hermit Crab, we discussed the friendships that were created between Hermit Crab and his friends. During job time we played a variety of roll the dice games and wrote about what we liked learning about Eric Carle.
Children rolled a die to determine how man of each friend Hermit Crab would add to his house. At the end they added up the total number of friends he had.
Below is a cute video of the children rolling the magic dice (a smaller die within a larger one) to try and add on Hermit Crabs friends.

Ways to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle
As you all know, tomorrow we will be celebrating Earth Day. To prepare and become aware we have been reading books about the Earth, recycling and  planting trees. The children have almost mastered the concept that reducing, reusing and recycling are all different ways to support our environment. During our reading of Michael Recycle there was a portion in the story where one of the characters collected Kumquats. The children all wanted to know what a Kumquat was so we took a break from our story and walked to the kumquat tree on campus and many of the children found out that they did know what a kumquat was, they just never knew its name!
During Global Buddies we counted up all of the shoes that were collected during our One Day Without Shoes day. Tomorrow at community meeting we will be sharing with you how many pairs were collected. In case you won't be there tomorrow and are dying to know, their estimates (aside from J.B.s) are pretty close.

Because I was absolutely terrible about positing before the break I am going to leave you with a few oldies, but goodies :)
Backstage before the show

The beginnings of our Avenida mural.

The children have been writing (and receiving) letters every Monday and Friday.

A recess creation

Charles Schultz spotted at Fire Station #9

Making our mural

Working together to wrap up our boxes/buildings

A few of the businesses on Avenida de la Playa

Decisions decisions..

No shoes allowed!

M.B., S.Y. and J.B. with their Connecting Communities buddies after bundling all of the donated shoes.