Good Morning Dear Earth, Good Morning Dear Sun. . .

As you can see - it is time for an updated website.  The version that I am using in Squarespace is outdated and does not allow for photo editing, and then some days, just because it likes to keep me on its toes, it loads pictures sideways!  To find more pictures, in the correct orientation, checkout our FB page!

The first six weeks of school are all about routines.  It is my dream that the kids know the routines so well that they don't even need me, I could be late to school and they would just run the show beautifully.  This is a lofty goal, but these are the goals of the first six weeks of school!   We spend a lot of time practicing the basic routines that will make our days run smoother down the road.  

This group of children has really jumped in with both feet.  They are a super kind group of children with a real desire for learning.  While practicing how to take a work out and finish it has been the goal of the first several weeks, many of the children are off and running doing more and more challenging work.  

We have made lots of list with our names.  Lists of our favorite colors and lists of our favorite weekend activities.  These lists are a fun way to build community and start our daily literacy practice.

We have just started introducing letters and sounds to our new friends and our old friends are already writing in their journals and making posters for the wall.  We try to build literacy into all that we do so that it is not something to be done in isolation, but something that readers and writers and humans do!  I am sure in the very near future we are going to have amazing stories from these writers.

We start our day all together with a greeting and poem:

Good Morning Dear Earth,

Good Morning Dear Sun,

Good Morning Dear Stones and the Plants Everyone,

Good Morning Dear Bees,

And the Birds in the Trees,

Good Morning to You,

And Good Morning to Me.

We have hand gestures that go with the poem and we also have the poem written out on sentence strips for everyone to see.  One day last week the older children took turns finding sight words in the poem.  The true gift of multi-age instruction is that the younger ones learn so readily from their older peers!

We have been talking a lot about germs in our classroom.  This morning we did an experiment with dirty hands and feet!  We took one piece of bread and put it in a bag labeled 'control'.  This piece of bread we did not touch, just used a fork to put the bread in the zip lock bag.  Then we took a piece of bread and passed it around morning circle, everyone took a turn patting and touching it.  This bag we labeled 'normal hands'. Then we took a piece of bread and had some friends step on it to see what kinds of germs might be on their feet.  We labeled that 'feet'.  Finally, we asked a friend to go and wash her hands and then handle a piece of bread and put it in the bag.  We labeled that, 'clean hands'.  We made predictions about which bag of bread is going to grow the most mold. . . What is your prediction?

Have a wonderful week!

XOX Teacher Jen