Bridging Generations

This school year your child will have the opportunity to participate in a special friendship program called Bridging Generations.  The children in our 3^rd & 4^th grade class will be visiting a San Anselmo senior home, Bello Gardens, several times during the 2013-14 school year.

The goal of this program is to encourage friendships between school age children and older adults, and to use this intergenerational experience in classroom activities.  Skills such as reading, writing, research, interviewing, and art will be developed through these interactions.  Students also will learn to relate historical information to real life experience reflected in the seniors’ lives.

Additionally, this project aims to link the past with the present and to build mutual appreciation between generations.  Students will be educated about aging, dispelling some fears they may have about the elderly.

The children will be prepared for their interaction with the residents by participating in sensitivity training in our classroom.  The Intergenerational Coordinator from LITA (Love is the Answer), a nonprofit serving seniors in Marin, will be visiting our classroom on Tuesday to present information about about senior homes and the common physical and emotional traits of the elderly.  She will also respond to student questions and concerns as they share their personal experiences visiting with older adults.

Our first visit to Bello Gardens Will be Friday, October 11, 2013.

NatureBridge Outdoor Ed 2013!

Wow! What a fantastic trip!

When I think back on the three days that I spent in the Headlands with your kids, I’m amazed at how cohesively they approached their time together, and how engaged and grateful they were for the beautiful, joyful, challenging, hilarious, surprising, invigorating experiences that unfolded for us. 

Here are some of my favorite highlights:

• Teamwork on the volleyball court

• First meeting our awesome naturalist Jo! She was incredibly knowledgeable, engaging, and flexible. I'm so glad that we have a new friend at NatureBridge!

• Hiking to the pond where we collected and categorized the macro-invertebrates that help maintain the healthy ecosystem

• Way to go, girls! Nice work keeping your bunk clean and organized. There are few honors in this world greater than the Golden Pinecone!

• Sweet and silly morning faces after the first night

• Friends!

• Nature charades with our whole Lower Campus community

•  How lucky were we to enjoy that weather?! Sunscreen it up, kiddos!

• This is one of my absolute favorite moments. Jo challenged us to say a friend's name as we passed the squirrel around the circle in under 20 seconds! It took five tries, a lot of collaborative strategizing, and some innovative thinking before we got down to... 17 seconds! You should have heard the cheering!

• Welcome to the Hardcore Apple Club! Can you eat an ENTIRE apple? The trick is starting from the bottom so every bite includes delicious apple. I think these pictures are pretty hilarious. 

• Success! Cole learns the Hardcore Apple Club secret handshake! 

• Jo was a great storyteller. She told us a beautiful story about greed and sharing, illustrated by the gorgeous, bright orange carnelian stones on the beach. We searched until everyone found one and used it to make an unselfish, peaceful wish for the world. 

•   Deeply thoughtful wish-making

•  AND.... we're out. Sometimes you just need a 3 minute nap before lunch.

•  Here we are learning about invasive and native species on ice plant hill. Jo showed us how you can place the end of a piece of ice plant on your tongue and feel it sucking up water almost instantly. "How do you think that that might affect the ecosystem here on the dunes?" she asked. 

•  Love love love :)

•  Checking out the blue whale skeleton on the way the the Marine Mammal Center. One student said, "I knew they were really big, but this is UNBELIEVABLE." It really is remarkable to stand by a skeleton that size and imagine encountering such a massive creature in nature. 

•  We're so grateful that the MMC welcomed us to explore some of the important ways that local people are making a positive impact on our environment. 

• My favorite experience had to be our night hike down to Rodeo Beach. It was a full moon and we talked about perspective as we watched the moon rise higher and higher and appear smaller and smaller in the sky. We snuggled up on our backs to watch the stars as Naturalist Matt told us the story of the constellation Cassiopeia. Then he showed us the "stars in the sand" as we found bioluminescent plankton that sparkles when you move the sand around. 

I have a few more pictures from the service project that we did on Friday that I'm excited to show you tomorrow. Thank you to Ben and Dean for being with us in the evenings to support us in countless, gracious ways. Thanks to all our drivers and to Genevieve for coordinating. And thanks to all of you for the great honor of heading out into the world with your kids. We feel more connected that ever and it's so clear to all of us that this is going to be a year full of big growth for our very loving community. 

Birthdays, Meetings, and Poems

We're all very excited to embark on our spectacular, overnight adventure on Wednesday. It's a true honor for me to step out into the grander world with your kiddos. This trip is one of those unique experiences that leaves the kids feeling more connected and more independent at the same time. If you haven't already, be sure to let me know if there's anything extra I can be doing to support your child and make sure this trip is full of growth and fun for him or her. 

Smiles!

Happy birthday Max!

Max is in the seat of honor while his classmates shower him with loving kindness. Everyone (including Max!) shares a couple things that they love about Max or a couple of reasons why they're glad he's on the team. I think that our friends' birthdays are a great moment to talk about sincerity-- about what it feels like to really see one another and share the whole truth, straight from your heart.

Spelling practice:

Below, students identify subtraction problems in which...

1) they need to do no regrouping

2) they need to regroup the tens in order to have enough ones in the ones column

3) they need to regroup the hundreds in order to have enough tens in the tens column

4) they need to regroup the both the tens and the hundreds in order to complete the algorithm

Then they define patterns and rules for efficiently identifying the different types of subtraction problems without solving the problems first. This helps the students look more abstractly at the mathematical structure of the algorithm.

Emmy is deciding where to place the next line break in a beautiful poem called "Stacking Wood".  We're trying our hand at some of the strategies that great poets use to give their poetry a rhythm and musicality.

Studying lines for Readers Theater:

Congratulations Hugo! Hugo did a fantastic job facilitating the first student-led Class Meeting of the year. He led a discussion about the possibility of getting a class pet. He kept the excited energy up while he also brought awareness and seriousness about the responsibility that it would be. I'm excited to see how this discussion moves forward in the next Class Meetings.

Here's a sneak peek at P.E. fun with Kathy: 

Happy birthday Luca! Luca rocked Room 7 with some funky harmonica grooves :)

I know that he felt touched to hear such genuine respect and admiration from his friends.

Thanks for write, write, writing a response to the Fluency Write prompt at Back to School Night. The kids were really excited to read what you wrote after they responded to the same prompt this morning.