January 25th, 2019

The last two weeks, we've celebrated friendship, kindness, respect, and responsibility.

To kick off our new unit, we worked on our door display...

We made paintings about our friends...

and we created Our Tree of Kindness where each leaf symbolizes an authentic, candid act of kindness.

We filled up our library...

and we created opportunities to practice using our kind words.

We became mindful as we helped one another...

we played with one another...

we worked with one another...

we cooked meals for our Stand Up For Kids homeless shelter with one another...

we high-five'd our friends from Pioneer Day School with one another...

and we loved one another.

A concept we worked hard on this unit was developing strategies to cope with feelings of frustration or anger...

and finding ways to soothe our upset feelings...

so that we can get back to loving one another.

We learned about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his teachings of kindness.

We also learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. begins with the letter M.

Coming back from the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, we were introduced to responsibility.
Meet our 4 new class pets; Pipsqueak, Tia, Tallulah, and Penny.

Caring for the mice is a lot of responsibility.
We have to feed them and make sure they always have water...

we have to clean the outside of their cage (cleaning the inside of the cage is solely a grown-up responsibility)...

we have to be gentle with the mice...

we have to be respectful of them...

and we have to wash our hands!

Once we leaned all of this with some hands-on experiences, we were ready to create our classroom book.  This will help us to teach others about the responsibilities of pet mice.  Using a combination of pictures, dictated words, and our own phonetically spelled writing, we completed our manifesto.

Then, we were ready to teach to our Pioneer friends who were considering class pets, too.

Further helping to instill our sense of personal responsibility (and our sense of unity), we developed our rotating chore chart.  For the remainder of the school year, we will switch jobs daily and have something we're each responsible for every day.

I'd say it's been a good two weeks!

January 11th, 2019

This week, we learned all about habits that keep us healthy.

We first filled up our library with all sorts of books...

and talked about what we already knew and what else we'd like to learn.

Then, we conducted some preliminary research.

For a fun science experiment and to gain an understanding of the importance of washing hands, each group was given two petri dishes.  We touched one dish with our dirty hands...

Then, we washed.

Next, we touched the second petri dish with our clean hands.

Finally, we made our predictions about what might happen.

As we waited for germs to grow in our test petri dishes, we bathed our babies...

and provided checkups for them.

And we washed.

We learned about how to keep our bones strong...

and examined x-rays.

And we washed.

We fished for foods...

and classified them by color.

And we washed.

We played some germy math games...

and we looked at germs on the interactive white board.

And we washed...en español!

We read about sleeping...

and we got good rest.

We exercised with our friends from Pioneer Day School...

and had so much fun!

We love our Pioneer friends.

Soon, it was already time to look at our petri dishes to see if we grew any germs.

(Don't worry!  These were sealed shut.)

At last, we were ready to draw our conclusion.

Armed with all of this knowledge, we prepared to teach KP-1 about habits that keep us healthy.

We taught them about getting enough sleep so that your body can rest and grow.

We taught them about eating healthy foods to give your body the nutrition it needs.

We taught them about exercise to keep your body strong.

And we definitely taught them about washing our hands to keep the germs away.

I think we nailed it this week!