Snowflakes!

      Snowflakes are one of the best things about winter!  You can catch them on your tongue, watch them dance in the air and look at them on your sleeve. And like us, they are all unique.   It takes many, many snowflakes to come together to build a snowman, a snowball or a snow fort!

PlacenTinkers read the book Snow by Uri Shulevitz.   In this whimsical story a boy wishes for snow and believes in this heart that the snow is coming!   With just a few snowflakes falling, the adults on the street say it's nothing, or that one snowflake isn't enough, or it'll just melt.   But the little boy sticks to his convictions that it will snow! 

     After reading the book we talked about how a single snowflake on its own doesn’t have much of an impact.  But when millions of snowflakes come together great things are possible.  And like snowflakes, PlacenTinkers are capable of creating great things when we COLLABORATE!  We collaborated in many ways!  Each class collaborated on creating a beautiful winter scene comprised of indivdual snowflakes using paint markers.  As a school, we collaborated on a giant poster called StickTogether!  We had such fun adding stickers to a large, pixelated mosaic.  Once completed, a colorful winter scene was revealed.   We also used iPads and coloring sheets to make penguins come to life using an Augmented Reality app called Quiver.  

     As PlacenTinkers we came to appreciate the benefits and power of collaboration. Collaboration creates a culture that values everyone's strengths and an environment that believes that we can all learn from one another.  To quote Helen Keller, “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much".