Merry Thoughts!
12/21/2018
As we end the last week of school before winter break I wanted to express how grateful I am to be able to get to know all of our wonderful Explorers. To learn what makes them laugh, what makes them excited, what brings them joy. It has been a privilege to watch them learn, to see them connecting ideas and experiences, and to see their faces when they discover something new about our world. I am so grateful to have such engaged learners who readily share their ideas and love. Thank you families for sharing your students with me and giving me the opportunity to be their teacher. This has been a great semester and am looking forward to the next. A Recap from Last WeekWe started last week with a bread taste test. Everyone had a chart to fill out and we tasted different breads that they had suggested wanting to try at the beginning of our study. We tasted 8 different breads including bagels, cheese breads, raisin breads, tortillas, and pitas. We had discussions about what flavors surprised us and what we learned about what we liked. Our Explores were very into this activity and the excitement of experimenting with new flavors. We added one more baking tool to our study last week: a bread maker. The bread maker was a wonderful way for the students to watch all steps of the breadmaking processes, especially the rising. We attempted two different loaves with two different yeasts. This turned out to be a happy accident as one yeast was no longer active and perfectly demonstrated the work that yeast does in dough. The bread maker bread turned out to be our favorite yet! Our final bread activity was to make and write new sandwich recipes. We used breads from our taste test and common sandwich ingredients to put together new flavor combinations. A popular choice was jam, turkey, and cheese! Some sandwiches were on classic bread, others on rolls or tortillas.
The Little Red Hen
12/7/2018
We have been reading many different versions of "The Little Red Hen," even one where pizza is made instead of bread! Some have the same characters, some different. Sometimes the animals get to eat the bread, often they don't. We have retold the story with puppets, felt storyboards, and props. All these activities help develop and integrate comprehension skills. "Comprehension, the process of finding meaning, is the goal of reading instruction. Comprehending text involves connecting what is heard and read with background knowledge and experiences." (Creative Curriculum, Vol. 6) Comprehension of simple stories is a vital part of future reading skills. Children learn new vocabulary, engage their cognitive skills, find patterns and the structure of the language the story revolves around. Having a strong comprehension also transitions to independent writing skills. The culmination of our "Little Red Hen" study was presenting the story as a play at our family breakfast. The students were so excited to make their animal hats and design and paint a background scene. They had wonderful ideas: "We need a miller," "Let's paint a bridge, since in one book the hen found the seeds on a bridge," "We should make animal noises." It was wonderful to see them sharing ideas, and growing our production. When it came time to practice, they needed hardly any prompting on what to say, having already memorized the story. They were beaming all morning from their performance. Highlights from our learning: painting snowmen, snowy recesses, baking and eating pretzels.
The Math of Bread
12/1/2018
This week we explored what kinds of bread we like. We began Monday by making cinnamon rolls. This recipe was a great place to start because the children were able to observe how similar the cinnamon roll dough was to the bread dough we had made previously. They noted that it felt similar, was made with similar ingredients, and also required kneading and rising time. Cinnamon rolls also introduced the concept of adding a different ingredient to make new types of bread. We took the list of suggestions (from our morning question) for what to add to dough to make new types of bread, and created a shopping list for a walking trip to Fred Meyers. The plan was to buy different breads and let the children perform a taste test, exploring which types of bread they liked. Unfortunately our shopping trip was postponed to next week due to the earthquake Friday. Baking breads and asking questions about how they taste provides students with opportunities to expand their math skills. Baking lets students practice basic math through reading numbers from recipes, counting, and measuring. It also promotes mathematical thinking in contrasting, comparing, estimating, and spatial reasoning. Our second baking project for the week was to make biscuits using a recipe from one of our story books. Students observed how this dough felt different from the cinnamon rolls, but was the same in that we needed to use a rolling pin to flatten the dough. We also used a new tool--a pastry blender--to combine the shortening into the flour. We used estimation skills to make predictions of how the biscuits would taste based on the ingredients. In addition to baking we have also been using graphs to help us see and process this learning. Our favorite graph right now is one charting how we felt about the taste of the bread we made. Students chose between "I like it, I like it a little, and I do not like it" for both recipes we made this week. Graphs allow children to see differences and similarities, provide many opportunities for one-to-one correspondence counting, simple addition and allow them to read the graph through the pictures and numbers. Our explorers are excited about the graphs we make and enjoy reading them and sharing them with visitors to the class. They feel empowered about their learning and now want to count all kinds of things. We can't finish a morning meeting without counting our responses to the morning question. We had the BEST time in our new snow this week! We made many, many snowmen, rolled monster snowballs, and laughed a lot!
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April 2021
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