Week One Notes

We started the year in our Outdoor Classroom! Here are some week 1 notes:

Monday, Sep 5

School Meeting - introductions, write rule book, choose team names (ages 6-7 "Pterodactyls," ages 9-13 "Plastic Utensils"), tour grounds

Classroom Management - organize school supplies: plan books, colored pencils, nature sketchbooks; explain how a flush toilet works



Nature Study - rescue blue-tailed skink from the mud kitchen sink, take apart a decaying log, collect monarch caterpillars and set up habitat, observe and sketch caterpillars, read Monarch and Milkweed by Helen Frost



Form Drawing - rolled beeswax candles (straight line and curve)

Map Skills - orienteering lesson #1 (the Directions Game)

Read Aloud Story - The Tales of Tiptoes Lightly by Reg Down

Tuesday, Sep 6

Nature Study - count caterpillars (11), collect more milkweed

Classroom Routines - choose #2 pencils; label and set up caddies with pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners; begin to write in plan books



Fairy Village - begin mulching, build fairy houses with parts of old broken up stump, design a fairy playground

Form Drawing - read I'm a Pill Bug by Yukihisa Tokuda, set up pill bug habitat, draw pill bug (circle), make bird nest sculpture (circle), discuss what else is a circle? jellyfish, head, black hole, Earth, Sun



Map Skills - pass out student copies of Mapping the World with Art and new blue MLBs, begin to draw first map



Educational Games - Plop Trumps Extreme, Tapes! The Game of Wacky Measurements (estimating using non-standard measurements)

Wednesday, Sep 7

5 Js, 12 cats

Nature Study - collect milkweed for the habitat, find a ladybug larva, watch an inchworm inch along

Chrysalis Day - stain Chrysalis costume green (with grass stains), miss several of our Js going into chrysalis form but then spot one just at the right time... and observe it very closely as it sheds its old skin!

Fairy Village - continue to work on mulching

Form Drawing - read A Log's Life by Wendy Pfeffer, find a log with fungi on it that matches the book's illustration, do tree ring activities, paint tree rings (concentric circles) on the blackboard with water



Classroom Management - begin reading meetings and math meetings one-on-one with older students to choose independent work

Map Skills - make a Floating Compass (great use for a rusty, broken, or bent felting needle), orienteering lesson #2 (the Word Find game), continue drawing maps, explain that this is mainly a Math block because of our focus on proportion and scale but children can add in bonus information (Science or Cultural) about each part of the world

Thursday, Sep 8

5 chrysalides, 4 Js, 6 cats remaining (1 died, 1 was put back outside)

Nature Study - add milkweed, discuss the life cycle of the tachinid fly

Fairy Village - complete the mulching project, finish the buildings in Fairy Village, add golden sand and tiny seashells to Gnome River, leave flowers and berries as gifts for the fairies, have a bubble party and blow lots of bubbles to let them know the village is open!



Form Drawing - do leaf rubbings using block beeswax crayons and newsprint, translate the leaf rubbings into pencil drawings of the venation patterns (are the arrangements of straight lines the same even when the leaves are different?), begin Celery in Colored Water



Map Skills - recall that our monarchs will fly south; read migration poetry by Aileen Fisher, Georgia Heard, and Joyce Sidman; review cardinal and intercardinal directions; explain secondary intercardinals



of course the immediate question from students was how far does it go? discuss the circle being broken into 360 degrees (and each degree 60 minutes and each minute 60 seconds), look at a protractor



Structured Word Inquiry - consider that < compass > means both
"an instrument containing a magnetized pointer which shows the direction of magnetic north and bearings from it" and
"an instrument for drawing circles and arcs and measuring distances between points, consisting of two arms linked by a movable joint, one arm ending in a point and the other usually carrying a pencil or pen"



hypothesize why this might be the case, look up < compass > in etymonline to see its origin

Art History - introduce our artist of the month (Alexander Calder), read Sandy's Circus: A Story About Alexander Calder by Tanya Lee Stone, discuss Beautiful Stuff project



Read Aloud Story - conclude book #1 (The Bee Who Lost His Buzz) from Tiptoes, lend to a student to continue reading at home

Friday, Sep 9

9 chrysalides, 4 Js, 2 cats

Saturday, Sep 10

13 chrysalides, 2 cats

The photos to go with this week are here.

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