October 8, 2010

October 8, 2010

Notes From the Week

(Some of this is a recap of notes I sent home on Monday and Wednesday.)

Monday:

We had a great field trip today to the Flynn. As you know, we've been studying Today and Long Ago. Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the Little House on the Prairie series, lived at the end of the 1800s and traveled west with her family to homestead. She wrote all about the pioneer life. The play we saw today had a simple set and only four characters: Ma, Pa, Mary (her older sister), and Laura.

Our class learned about how people 130 years ago traveled not by car but by wagons and horses. They learned that many families grew and raised all the food they ate. They learned that especially if you lived in "the country" you might not even be able to see anyone else's house from your front doorstep, so you mostly played with your brothers and sisters. They learned that it took Laura and her family 3 months to travel from Wisconsin to Kansas by horse and wagon. They learned about homesteading, the threat of wild animals, and the threat of locusts. They learned that Laura became a writer by keeping a journal and by learning to describe for her blind sister, Mary, the many sights she saw.

Another thing we saw was the excitement -- a mixture of hope and fear -- that the Ingalls family-- and many other pioneer families felt whenever they headed off into unknown lands looking for land and work. Pa kept saying, "C'mon Ingalls Family! We got places to go!" He also was famous for saying, "THAT'S the pioneering spirit!" Another thing he said was, "When something bad happens, something good always comes of it."


Tuesday:

For writing, we talked about how sights and smells remind you of things that have happened to you. We took a walk up on the hill behind the classroom. We got very quiet and we felt the sun on our faces. We smelled the damp grass. We heard the rattle of leaves falling through the branches of trees. We went around and shared any stories we had about things we like to do with our families in the fall. We also picked grass and wrapped it with rubber bands to make sheaves of wheat. We’re letting them dry. Then, we’re going to use them to create a fall scene in our classroom.

Wednesday:

We took a walk down the hall and put sticky notes on paintings of fall that we liked. We talked about what we noticed. We planned our own paintings. Then, we returned to the classroom, read a story about Fall, and we each did rough drafts of a personal Fall scene that we’ll be painting and then writing about. We also read from James and the Giant Peach and we noticed how when James climbed into that peach, escaping his miserable aunts and his bare-wood bed, he must have been scared. We talked about how nice it was for him that Spider wove a comfortable hammock-bed for him, and Grasshopper and Glowworm said kind words to him, and…

“Already he was beginning to like his new friends very much. They were not nearly as terrible as they looked. In fact, they weren’t really terrible at all. They seemed extremely kind and helpful in spite of all the shouting and arguing that went on between them. ‘Good night, old green grasshopper,’ he whispered…”

We talked about how, just like James, our class is embarking on an adventure together this year – our classroom is our peach. And if we can all try to be thoughtful and kind and caring to each other, and apologize if we hurt someone, we, like James, will like our new friends very much, and they will like us very much, and we will end up having, together, accomplished very much.

Thursday:

Thank you to Hannaford Supermarkets for sponsoring an exciting, zany, energetic, emmy-award-winning producton called Foodplay. The two main characters were a coach and a student. They did juggling and dancing and prank-playing, and they did an excellent job of teaching kids to

1) eat five fruits or veggies per day (scary, isn’t it, parents?),
2) read the ingredients on the packages (and notice what the first ingredient is because that’s the biggest ingredient) and
3) Look out for high fructose corn syrup ‘cause it’s pretty-much just sugar.

Friday:

We began the day with a Morning Meeting sing-along. We couldn’t help it. “Cutter, Cutter, bo-butter, banana fanna fo-futter, fee-fi mo-mutter…. In Math, both first and second graders are deepening their understanding of patterns. With a new month, we have a new, emerging pattern to figure out in our Number Corner. In Reading, we are practicing picking books that are just right for us using the five-finger rule (as you read, every time you come across a word that you can’t read, you put one finger down on the page.) If you put all five down before the page is through, it’s a good reminder that you should put this book aside and read it later in the year. Right now, you should pick a book that is easier for you.

We ended the day with a great presentation from the Williston Fire Department. Special thanks to Thom Moore – firefighter and EMT, He’s Harley Moore’s dad.

Note: you should find a “Class Friendship List” (aka telephone list) in your child’s backpack today.

That’s it for now. Have a restful weekend.

David