Monday

April 29th, 2013

This morning the children came to school determined not to let the grey drizzle that was happening outside dampen their enthusiasm for learning. The children wrote journal entries about their weekends and filled the pages with colorful depictions of their thoughts.

They also worked on some longterm projects like self portraits in the art studio, and our wire basket sculpture which has somehow become even more colorful!

After a busy early morning choice time, the whole class came together for a morning meeting. In meeting our friend Xander shared with us a book called Ben Franklin and the Magic Squares. Xander was excited to share this book with the class and we enjoyed reading it together and learning about this very famous man.

Then we talked about the month we are in right now, April. We discussed how we are at the end of this month and that soon we will be in a completely new month of May. With this in mind, we thought about beginning a new study based on things we as a class are interested in right now. And so it is with plenty of excitement that we begin looking at how April showers might bring May flowers!

Our wonderful science teacher heard of our interest and invited us to her resource room for a special science class to look more closely at flower. She was amazed at what the Cardinals already knew and showed us a model and diagram of a flower so we could start to identify the different parts. The Cardinals were very interested in the pollination process and how this helps in the formation of new flowers. After our discussion, Roseanne invited us to explore the Science Room and the Cardinals immediately looked at books, began asking questions about the tanks and animals inside and examined some starter plants created by another class. During this free time, great questions were asked and the Cardinals displayed their wealth of knowledge and how curious they are in our environment and the living things that are a part of it.

We returned to our classroom to finish up our choice time work before lunch. Around lunch time the children felt they'd like to stretch their legs before sitting down to eat so we walked to the front of the Lower School as a group and escorted our half day friends out, waving to them as they walked to their cars. At the front door we ran into the half day friends from the Owl classroom who had just finished reading a book about a young mouse who wants to join her school chorus. We had never heard of this book, so the Owls let us borrow it to read before lunch. After reading the story, we talked about what a chorus is and how someone can learn how to sing for a chorus and Christina shared with us that she has been teaching voice lessons this past week to kids who want to learn to sing, like the main character in the story. The Cardinals were interested in the singing process so we did a quick singing lesson explaining what some of the exercises a vocal student might practice that can help someone learn how to warm up their voices for singing experiences like what happen in the story.