Week #3

Our focus for this week is the Responsive Classroom approach. This national program is an integral part of our Lower School. In our preschool classroom we lay the foundation for what the Lower School site explains are the highlights:

• Morning Meeting
• Classroom Rules
• Interactive Modeling
• Positive Teacher Language
• Logical Consequences
• Guided Discovery
• Academic Choice
• Classroom Organization
• Working with Families
• Collaborative Problem Solving

The first weeks of school are particularly important. By taking the time needed to build on a solid social foundation during the first weeks, we help children build a sense of community while developing a sense of autonomy. Children participate in developing guidelines, they learn routines and responsibilities, and they see how learning is interconnected. Participating in developing and learning the structure of routines helps children develop the sense of security, confidence and self-regulation necessary for learning.

Each day we have a morning meeting. The structure is the same; we all sit in a circle. We keep this to just a few minutes and focus on the essentials – a greeting that includes every child by name, roll call, our daily schedule so children know what to expect, and a review of our jobs so we all take collective responsibility for our classroom.

What varies from day to day is how we greet one another. This week, for example, we learned our greeting in French, and the children chose to say, “Hi-dee-ho” in front of each name! We love seeing smiles and giggles accompanying greetings. We are gradually introducing jobs and have a door holder, attendance helper, calendar helper and weather helper.

We always eat lunch together, and use this time to enjoy one another’s company and have pleasant conversation. Variations this week have included eating with the 9^th graders, and eating outside with our Kindergarten friends.

This week had a rich array of activities and investigations. We have read many interesting books which relate to our activities, including Silvester and the Magic Pebble (our stones of many shapes and colors,) Bear Hunt (Teddy Bear Day,) The Peace Book and The Feelings Book (learning about ourselves, how we interact in a community, and finding words to express how we feel,) The Boing Boing Book (for fun, and to introduce sounds,) Babar the King (living in and contributing to a community,) and Gilberto and the Wind (experiencing the many moods of the winds and breezes.)

We have continued our long-term project making nature catchers focusing this week on walking on our many nature trails and gathering twigs, leaves, feathers, pebbles, acorns and flowers. Each excursion has offered physical and social benefits, as well, including fresh air, holding hands, assisting one another, meeting up with other students and lots of discussion about where to go and what to choose. We also stop to marvel. We think we saw a raccoon on Wednesday! We also saw what we think are great blue heron tracks at the pond. Can you find the beautiful spider web we saw in the photo?

Our rainy Tuesday kept us indoors (please outfit your child with rain gear so we can go outside, too!) This led to integrated language arts, math and science observations of our stones. We classified them by size, shape, color and texture, all the while finding words to describe our observations.

This also led to a new project, an investigation of leaves. We gathered, sorted and talked about leaves, and we explored many ways to represent them. We pasted leaves, made cutouts of leaves, did leaf rubbings and drew our own creations. Our outdoor activities build our large muscles and our indoor work doing paper cutting, coloring and drawings develops small muscles.

Some of the parents in our class have asked what they can do to complement our activities. We encourage you to continue what you are doing naturally – talking with and reading with your child, making sure your child is well rested and packing a healthy lunch. This is so important! Every day we benefit from your efforts by having happy, well-adjusted and curious children come to us.

We also love it when children arrive on time so that we can all begin our day together. It is equally important to have appropriate clothing for rainy days. A light rain is perfect for stimulating, enriching play and exploration! Don’t you agree?