This week’s weather put a damper on my class visit routines. In lieu of the usual, more detailed insight into two grade levels, here is a set of small moments I observed in students’ learning across campus this week:
- 8th grade scientists are learning about RECs (Renewable Energy Credits), calculating Hillbrook’s energy use, and discussing how it can be that one shared electrical grid can offer consumers the choice to use only wind, solar or other renewable sources for their power.
- 1st grade authors are writing poems with juicy language! This week, they began writing poems about summer that include a reference to all five senses. Stay tuned for details about this year’s annual 1st/2nd Grade Author’s Walk-About to be treated to a reading.
- 6th grade readers finished the semi-autobiographical novel, Pashmina, about a young Indian-American immigrant and led their first “Socratic Seminar” of the year. They took turns facilitating the group, generating discussion questions, and using their book annotations to answer others’ questions with textual evidence. Themes like culture of modern India, immigration, and teens’ experience with race, class, gender, bullying and secrecy offer great threads for connection and reflection.
- Kindergarten mathematicians wrote “number sentences” about picture stories, flexing their numeral writing, math symbols, and knowledge of subtraction and addition to describe pictures mathematically. A picture of a library with people at tables and books in hand inspired conversation like, “I see four chairs here and three chairs here. I wrote ‘4+3’” and also “I see four chairs but one is away [from the table]. I wrote ‘4-1’”. Math is everywhere and students loved hearing their peers’ math thinking about the same images.