Guest Blogger- Mila!

      Last Wednesday in art class our class decorated the inside of our pioneer journals.  We didn’t use little bits of leather or other doodas, we used ripped up pieces of brown paper bags, varnish, crushed natural colored chalk, and more varnish. The journals look completely fabulous.

Gloria's hands with her awesome pioneer journal
(or A-W-E-S-O-M-E, as Devin would say)

Mila's pioneer journal (OWNED BY NATIVE AMERICAN)

      On Tuesday our class made marble runs out of PVC pipes and kapla blocks. With only 3 girls and 4 boys, our class broke into groups to build the best marble runs that I’ve ever seen! We were allowed to use tape and other random objects around the classroom. It was really cool to see if the runs worked properly and how fast the marbles went.

Mila,  Vivienne, and Gloria make a super cool marble run. 

a marble has rolled into a paper cop

An opening in the PVC pipe

     Tuesday was also Alex’s birthday!!! He shared his bear that he got when he was born, a picture of Shilah, and a photo of a big fish that he caught in Colorado. Then we all got popcorn and played a game of dodgeball. After that we each got a jolly rancher and went home.

    Our class is having a really hard time staying away from fevers and the flu.  We are getting close to 5 people in the whole class! I hope that every one is back by Monday. I am missing every one. Some times I tell Devin that nobody is actually sick, they’re just on vacation!!!

  

Alex shares his bear stuffy

Alex shares a picture of a fish that he caught

A picture of Alex's dog, Shilah 

Meeting, Science, and Scenes from Break

Here is Dylan facilitating the class meeting. He was the first student to facilitate for the second time and he shared that it went much more smoothly and he felt more clear about what to do. 

"So, look forward to that, guys!" he said. 

He chose to follow up on a discussion from a previous meeting about a possible 3rd and 4th grade class overnight trip. The group agreed that it would be fun to spend a night camping at Samuel P. Taylor. I'm open to the idea and allowed the motion to pass, contingent on a number of important details coming together in future meetings. Dylan did a great job of managing the class and keeping the discussion on track!

On Tuesday, I was working with the 5th and 6th graders and Lindsay and I invited them to join the 3rd/4th grade science class. The students worked together to research a planet. The 5th and 6th graders also shared some of their favorite aspects of middle school science and explained what to expect when they move over to Javier's class.

Sweet moments from lunch this afternoon...

Have an awesome weekend! If you're headed to the snow, zoom down a hill, then enjoy a warm beverage for me! And perhaps take a moment to ask your kid to share a little about what he or she has learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. this week. 

Guest Blogger- Skyler!

Last week we had a pioneering campfire with the tables tilted on their sides for the “wagons”, and a candle for the flame with logs and rocks surrounding it. We still have the wood and candle on the floor! We all had a good time. We sang songs and Devin told “scary” stories, one of them was when Devin and her friends were staying alone in South Dakota during winter and Devin’s dad tricked them into thinking that a ghost was knocking on the door! J On 1/17/13, we painted Martin Luther King Jr. No, let me correct you, we finger-painted him!J Using black and white paint and our fingers to paint finger-sized dots paint sections of a picture of him, and we’re soon going to put it up on our wall. -Skyler

The following photos of the Team 3/4 artists were shot by Skyler. Such interesting perspective!

I'm very excited about how our Dr. King portrait turned out. I think it's really spectacular and a beautiful way to honor such an important man. You should definitely come check it out in person. This week, we read a MLK biography by Mary Winget that I love because it's filled with incredible photographs. We also discussed non-violent resistance and the context of life in the segregated South that necessitated such a passionate and powerful response. 

Skyler also took these photos of a sculpture workshop taught by Alex! The whole class was very grateful to Alex for bringing in the clay and teaching us some techniques for molding emotive faces. 

Way to step up, Alex! 

Guest Blogger- Max!

Hello my name is Max. I’m the team 3^rd and 4^th grade blogger at ccs for our class. In my opinion our class learns  and has fun at the same time. Like when we wrote to authors and some of us got responses. Some of us even got signed pictures! It feels good to get letters from famous people it makes you feel like they care. We pay attention in class. And we help each other. We have a wide expanse of books in our library.

The photos below were taken by Max!:

Welcome Back!

Welcome back! I have to tell you, it feels so great to be back in the class with these awesome kids! Thank you all so much for the most gracious gifts. I was very touched by your thoughtfulness. It means so much to me, truly. 

It felt great to get right back into the swing of things. The 3rd graders had a very exciting day today. They started... drumroll please... MULTIPLICATION! 

We'll work with modeling multiplication as repeated groups, repeated addition, arrays, and areas before starting the amazing 9-Lines visual imaging curriculum.

The 4th graders are translating the work we've been doing with finding the area of rectangles to their first algorithm for ***multi-digit multiplication***!

If you didn't hear, we ended the day on a very exciting note. We wrote letters to our favorite authors months ago, and some of our students received replies! I'll wait to tell you more because Max is going to share the excitement as our first student blogger of the year! I've added a job to the job board and now one student each week will be responsible for writing a blog post and taking and uploading photos. Today the kids brainstormed the types of topics the blogger could write about and you can look forward to posts about projects in class, adventures on the playground, sample student work, and the ways we see kindness in action in our community.