Hello families,
This week was short and sweet for us in the one/two classroom!
During our read aloud time, we finished up Malala’s biography. As I stated last week, Malala is someone I deeply admire. The students and I enjoyed getting to know about her life leading up to becoming known worldwide. When we finished the book, we watched a video of her giving a speech at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, after becoming the youngest recipient of the prestigious award. I wanted them to watch her give her speech, not just because the content is worthy, but because the power of seeing a 17-year-old taking a stage to advocate for kids like herself is moving. We discussed how she began this journey at 11 years old, young enough to be a student at SK. Malala’s story is one of bravery and it's also a story that sticks with you. I hope that hearing her story plants seeds of strength in each of the children, even if it's not quite realized yet.
In project time, we began to organize our thoughts for writing our memoirs. I defined memoir for them as telling a story of a memory that makes you really feel. That feeling can be anything. They began to tap into these memories to engage in our prewriting activity. Each student brought in photos from home and with those photos they broke down what was going on in the picture/memory, what the memory made them feel (either at the time, or currently), and who was all there (photographed or not). Upon first thought, students wanted to default to happy when writing about their feelings. We discussed that while happiness is a wonderful feeling, the emotions we feel (even positive ones) range greatly. I pushed them to search for words that better describe their memories. While of course the word happy was still used at times, words such as nervous, excited, exhausted, giggly, and adventurous began to creep into their work. Next week we’ll continue to stretch their writing and I’ll introduce more descriptive language to them so they’re able to put into words how they experienced these precious memories.
In math, we are beginning a measurement unit. For our next unit, we will be building our very own community! This will *building* will be done by creating our own societal rules/values AND becoming city planners, building models of our ideal town. To do this, we need to become experts at measuring and we also need SUPPLIES! If you have any recyclables that you can part with (I’ll be heading to the Scrap Box periodically), we need anything that the students might be able to use to construct a model. Think cardboard boxes (big and small), toilet paper rolls, paper bags, etc.! The model building will be the last component of our next unit, so we have time to collect!
As always, I’ll leave you with some pictures from different parts of our week!
Enjoy,
Tate