Carriage House

Building our muscles before hitting the slopes!

The Barn Owls have been busy preparing for the ski slopes!  In the days building up to our first ski trip, The Barn Owls helped prepare their muscles and enhance their balance by doing some warm up exercises.

We started out with the “balance snowflake”. Kiddos took turns standing in the center of the snowflake. While standing on one foot, they used the other foot to touch the points around them without pivoting their body. Once they completed that, they did the same but with the further points on the snowflake, stretching their legs to tap each point without falling over. (Not as easy as it sounds!) Once they mastered that, they switched feet and did it with the other leg. 

Students then worked as a group to communicate and practice bending their knees and going over jumps. They stood in a circle on drawn out “foot spots”, counted down from three, then jumped to the next place to their left, being sure to work together and jump as a team. Without proper communication they would jump into each other! In addition to practicing their balance, knee bending and jumps, this was a great team building exercise as well!

Barn Owls then worked with Elder Guardians to create other skiing, snowboarding and balance related games for everyone to enjoy together. Their games ranged from jumping from “snowboard” to “snowboard”, to “skiing” elaborate obstacle course trails (while keeping your feet in “pizza” or “french fry” formation - ski terms you might be familiar with), to finally, a “downhill ski race”!

This was a fun way to get our bodies moving and to prepare ourselves for the time we will be spending on the mountain. Students worked together and stretched their imaginations to come up with some really creative challenges that helped to build the excitement of what is to come. We are ready and can’t wait to hit the slopes!

We’ve had a busy month back at school! Students have begun tracking their reading habits to set personal goals and are in the midst of a fiction writing project. Read on to find out more about what we’ve been up to.

Reading Logs

One of my goals for the new year was to strengthen curricular structures around independent reading. Each kid has different interests, habits, and routines related to reading. As students reach upper elementary school, the ways they can grow as readers continue to diverge from each other. We also know that at this developmental stage, kids are flexing their muscles for independence. They are more motivated to develop new habits or try things that they identify as goals. Tracking data about what kids are currently reading, when, and how frequently is the first step to supporting this process.

We started off the semester with the question, “Why do people read?” Students identified many reasons, including to expand what we know about the world, learn about how other people live, see ourselves and our identities reflected in stories, and to strengthen our vocabularies. Then, I introduced reading logs. Students were asked to read 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Unlike reading logs at more traditional schools I have worked in, this one gives students more choice. Choice in what to read, when to read during the day, and which days to read in a given week. This helps students experience that there is no one right way to work towards a goal and we have to adapt to meet our schedules and other needs.

Building a new habit requires time and gradual release of support. The first two weeks of using reading logs, I checked that they were brought to school and filled out everyday. For students who were doing that consistently, they are now only checking in with me once a week, randomly. For students who need additional support to remember to bring their log each day, I am continuing to check their logs everyday. We also brainstormed additional supports during our individual reading conferences. This allows students to build independence around a new responsibility with the level of support that meets their needs.

Every two weeks, students get out their reading logs and meet with me one-on-one for a reading conference. Students share what they have been reading, what genres they are gravitating to, and what the books are about. We also talk about if they are meeting their goal and what they might need to change if they are not. Some students have already been able to identify that they may be reading too quickly to understand the story or that they can’t focus on what they are reading with the TV on in the background. Yesterday a student shared that they are sleeping better because they are reading at night and find it very relaxing. Some students are incredibly hard on themselves when they forget to read and these meetings give them a chance to share that and hear that it’s okay, we can try again!

Book Tasting

Another way we need to support students with reading frequently and consistently is by making sure they have enough books! To kick this off, Siobhan and I hosted a “Book Tasting” in the library. Students got to try a sampling of books from different genres and write down titles they were interested in reading. A challenge related to the independence desired at this age is that students can have a really ingrained belief of what they like and what they don’t. Instead of hearing from an adult, “But, it’s also important to try something else!” this activity gave students the experience of independently finding books they might not have gravitated to on their own. Students were surprised and delighted to find books they didn’t know they would be interested in. 

Writing

We also started a fiction writing project. As we finished the novel Ghost by Jason Reynolds, students discussed the events of the book as they related to different parts of a story: building background, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. They identified how Reynolds made choices throughout the story that connected back to things we had learned about the main character’s personality and experiences at the very beginning. We then shifted to thinking about these structures in our own writing. 

Since the beginning of the year, students have been brainstorming story ideas in their writer’s notebooks. They chose one to take through the writing process. Students are in various stages, working at their own pace. They are also using resources like graphic organizers and peer revision sheets to structure their work at each stage. They are also required to attend two writing workshops during Choice time before they move on to the revision stage.

One thing that I have been excited about is experimenting with giving students more choice about the writing strategies they are practicing in these stories. In past teaching assignments, the curriculum has required that all students learn and implement the same strategies at the same time. We are trying something different than this teacher driven approach.

 As we began this project, students were given a rubric. This provides a clear outline of some of our expectations around fiction writing that we hope students will leave Randolph having included in various stories. For this project, each student chose two skills or strategies to focus on. Once they have a solid grasp of those, they can move on to implementing new ones in future stories. These are also the areas they will receive feedback on during the revising process, giving structure to the student revising as well. 

In order to support students in acquiring these new skills and strategies, I have been offering writing workshops during Choice Time. Students sign up for the workshop they are interested in attending and need to attend two before moving on to revising. So far these have included: Dialogue that moves the story forward; Big action and small action; Hooking the reader with a strong introduction; and Sloooooowing down our description. Students have been motivated to try new things because of this structure around choice. They are also learning from each other through sharing our writing, working collaboratively, and revising each other’s work.

We’ve also been quite busy with work around revision, feedback, and goal setting, as well as implementing new strategies from number talks into our math group stories. There are some links to how everyone is skiing too.  Stay tuned for more updates in a few weeks!