Carriage House

11/10/22

Barn Owls

Connecting with Friends in Far Away Places

Last week the Barn Owls had the special opportunity to connect with their pen pals from Uganda face to face via Zoom! What an amazing experience it was! The Barn Owls were bursting with excitement the morning of our meeting, and it was clear our new friends from The COBURWAS School were just as eager. Each kiddo had the opportunity to come up to the screen to say hello to their assigned pen pal. They waved and asked how each other were doing. To be able to put a name and a face together, and to see who their letter will be going to was amazing. Barn Owls have been working hard on their first letters, learning the proper format of writing a letter and how to ask open ended questions along the way. Their letters are officially finished and ready to be sent off to our new friends! We cannot wait to hear back from them!

Life of the Lenape: A How to Book

As we get into Native American Heritage Month, the Barn Owls have been diving deep into learning about the Lenape people and how they lived off the land. What started out as a QFT process (Question Formulation Technique), students narrowed down their questions to four that interested them most. These questions focused on how the Lenape built their houses, how they obtained food and how they made tools. From there Barn Owls spent time using images to make inferences to help answer those questions, and finally we watched videos and took notes to gather our research.

Kiddos are now working on telling a story through the lens of a Lenape person. Each student has taken on the role of either a hunter, gatherer, farmer, builder, fisher or crafter. They have gone through our research and picked out key details that apply to their role and are currently working on writing an expository text that lists the steps of how to do something, whether it be how to build a wigwam, how to make a bow and arrow, or how to plant corn, just to name a few. We are working on using sequence words such as “first”, “next”, “then”, and “finally”. Students have been so excited to make connections to not only how the Lenape lived, but how we can (and sometimes already DO) do some of these things here at Randolph!

We look forward to going through the five steps of the writing process to complete our “How To Books” to add to our “Randolph Made” selection of books in our library for all of our Randolph friends to read!

Elder Guardians

Reading Comprehension and “Why is that word spelled that way?!” (AKA, phonics)

We’ve continued to balance our reading curriculum by exploring texts that are connected to our inquiry and engaging in lessons that give students more practice with the code of reading and writing in English.

Reading to Understand

Over the last two weeks, we’ve explored how the brain and nervous system allow us to experience emotions. Students have been asking questions about how our brains work, what parts of the brain are responsible for what functions, and how our brains send messages to other parts of the body. We’ve practiced note taking from multiple sources and have read texts connected to the topic. We’ve shifted our reading comprehension focus from preparing for group discussions to work around vocabulary development. Students are responsible for identifying words they could not define for someone else and are building their toolbox of skills and techniques to define them on their own. Students have also continued to practice annotating, taking notes and responding to the text as they read.

Spelling Patterns and Phonics

In phonics groups, students are practicing reading and writing words with glued sounds (like old, ost, ild, and ank), long vowel patterns, and open and closed syllables. After reading a text together multiple times for a specific purpose each time, students are able to use a personalized computer application tied to our phonics program. This allows them to read other texts focused on the same skill at their own place, practice identifying and spelling words with the target pattern, and answer text-dependent questions. We’re also using word sorts so that students have additional practice with the spelling patterns they are working on. They physically group words according to spelling patterns and practice spelling them in isolation.

Place Value, Number Talks, and Story Situations

In math, students are continuing to work on building their capacity for mental calculations, explaining their thinking verbally and in writing, and connecting what they are practicing in number talks to the multi-step story situations they are focused on in math groups. All students have been working on identifying place value and using this understanding when they add, subtract, and multiply. We’re beginning to implement math games in Morning Meeting, giving students another opportunity to practice mathematical skills throughout the day.

Preparing for our Celebration of Learning

Students have chosen three projects to complete for our Me Museum which will take place before the whole school winter celebration in December. After choosing their projects, students received a checklist of steps to follow over the next few weeks. Students are responsible for using this resource to finish their projects and have choice around which projects they work on when. In addition to projects that students are working on during choice, we are also revising descriptive writing about an important tradition in our lives, which will also be showcased at our celebration of learning.

Contributing to Our Community

Our community work these last two weeks has been focused around making our lean-to space work for our needs. When we first moved to the lean-to, students identified materials we needed to bring, found stumps that worked for our circle, and listed things we wanted to build or create. With evan’s help, the kids built a lean-to on our lean-to to store firewood for the winter. Every morning, students bring firewood down to our shed. They also find and prepare kindling and have begun chopping firewood and tending to the fire (with kid-size tools and adult supervision)

Giving students the opportunity to contribute to creating and taking care of our learning spaces is an important part of progressive education. In this way, students have the opportunity to work together to solve problems and feel proud of the contributions they make to our community. It also gives students an intrinsic motivation to take care of our space because they contributed to making it.

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