Sunday, August 25, 2013

First Week of School

We had a truly lovely first week in our new space. A few highlights are below.

This is our new betta fish, thanks to K:


After discussion and voting, he was named "Cabellin."

He also now has a lovely rock bed in his tank and K, our animal caretaker, has created a chart for his feeding and tank cleaning. I purchased a betta fish plant that should grow in the water to add to his tank this week.

Here is E, so proud of her phonogram work this week:


And L with her word building as well:


One of my favorite pieces of work in our classroom is linear and skip counting with the bead chains. K remembered his lovely spiral for his 6s on Thursday:



We also created our classroom guidelines (these are in your child's communication folder - please sign to let us know that you've reviewed them). We will continue our discussion all year long about our last guideline ("willing good") - how do we put good into our community and into our world? How do we gracefully receive it as well?

Thanks to all parents for returning field trip permission forms in such a timely fashion! We have a few field trips coming up this week to the library and to the Natural Gardener. Watch for an email for the specifics.

Last, we ended our Friday with homemade all-fruit sno-cones (we'll spend some time charting the results of our taste test on Monday of this coming week) and with our first ever pizza Friday (at the children's request). In addition, we had a special visitor who we are considering appointing as our new chess coach if he'll agree to join us at least one Friday a month. I believe this match ended in a draw.


Thank you to all of our elementary families for being so accommodating as we begin our program; I know we have many adventures to come this school year!

Peace,
Sunni