Dear Parents,
Thank you for all sending your children prepared for the cold and snowy weather last week. They have been very creative in their snow play, even though the snow got icier and icier as the week went on, and their teacher kept imposing more rules for safety 🙂
UPCOMING EVENTS
- No Office Hours, Monday, Dec 19.
- Shepherds Play, Tuesday, Dec 20, 2:00 pm.Â
- Community Advent Spiral, Tuesday, Dec 20, 5:30 pm. Join us for this most lovely and reverent celebration of light. You may come on your own or bring your whole family. The event begins at 5:30 with a story.
- Last Day, Wednesday, Dec 21.
- Please send an extra bag with your child this day so they may more easily carry things home. They will be bringing home some first term work and all items from their cubbies.
- December Break – NO SCHOOL – Thursday, Dec 22-Friday, Jan 6. School resumes Monday, Jan 9.
CLASSROOM HIGHLIGHTSÂ
The children have spent a lot of time this block working with their hands on artistic projects. Maybe some of your children have mentioned that they have been hearing installments of a long story all block, with the exception of a couple days off for a story on Saints Nicholas and Lucy. Most days, we’ve been remembering and reviewing our “bunny story” through artistic work like clay modeling, plasticine modeling, origami, and illustration. Last week, however, we did something bigger. Each child was given a bunch of materials (paper, pipe cleaners, sticks, beeswax, etc.) and asked to recreate in 3-D one part of the story, any part they wanted. It was a two-day project in morning lesson. I was going to stand firm and not help them at all, but it turned out I didn’t need to. They each of them had their own ideas about how to create a mountain or a tree or whatever they needed. The room had that whispering buzz that comes with productive work. We will be putting these little dioramas into story order and retelling the story this week, seeing which parts we’ve missed.
It has been a really lovely block so far, with a strong rhythm to morning lesson. Every day we spend a few minutes warming up, usually some singing and a seasonal folk dance (first a new version of last year’s Hanukkah dance and now a line dance to Jingle Bells). Then we go into 5-10 minutes of math work. Their 6 table has been introduced this block, and we’re still working every day on the others we know in addition to mental math problems. Then we spend a few minutes on our pentatonic flutes. I’m happy to say we’ve made a breakthrough on flutes, with much of the class feeling stronger on the lower, more difficult notes that take more fingers to play. This could only happen because of the children’s focus during our daily flute practice.
After that we remember, in varying ways, our story. Building up the forces of memory is a big task of the grade school child. Now that we remember it, we get to work with it both artistically and literally. By literally, what I actually mean is that underneath a lot of the work this  block is actually a language arts or literary component, especially around building a sense of narrative. As we step into the latter half of second grade, the children will move slowly into composition work, and this block laid the foundations for that.
Best,
Hannah