Seabury Pioneers: Just another normal week at Seabury ...

Yes, it's been just another normal week for the Explorers, swimming lessons not withstanding. I realized as I was trying to decide what to feature this week that this is usually my problem - not WHAT am I going to blog about this week, but WHICH of the many neat lessons am I going to feature - there's always so much to choose from! I also realized that it might be interesting to see a whole week's worth of stuff we're doing in the classroom, as opposed to focusing on one single event. So - here is, truly, what a normal week looks like:

SCIENCE: As we learn about he sense of touch, we did an experiment about what part of the hand is the most sensitive: the palm, fingertip, wrist or back of the hand. Students took turns touching each others' hands with one or two prongs of a paper clip and recording whether the subject felt the correct number. We're still working on graphing the data and determining the overall class result.

MATH: Each day we start our math lesson by working through several problems on the Smart Board, then sharing our different strategies and solutions. Here students showed how they solved a story problem by counting on using a number line, drawing a picture to represent what happened in the problem, skip counting, and repeated addition. Sometimes we make a mistake, but we usually figure that out while we're explaining our answers, and often - ah ha! This leads to greater understanding for all! (I live for the a-ha moments!)

ART: Not left out of the curriculum here, that's for sure! This was just a quick lesson on drawing a face and how to place facial features in the correct spots by using a rectangle instead of a circle to start your drawing.

READING: We use the Junior Great Books curriculum, and here we had a short Socratic Seminar style discussion of two opposing viewpoints about the main character in the story. The students in the center read their responses to a discussion question, listened to their classmates' reactions, and then were given a chance to make a rebuttal. These conversations are always lively and EXTREMELY interesting!

WRITING: Using some story cards for inspiration, we did some creative writing -- the stories could be about anything, but had to have a beginning, middle, and end. Some were about circuses, some were about chests full of gold, some were about magical bears. Many started with "Once upon a time," but after that they were all full of surprises!

MORE MATH: To wrap up the week, inspired by the Seahawks and Super Bowl XLVIII, (which everyone around here was pretty excited about), we did an exercise we like to call a "math adventure" about Roman Numerals. The kids were given a list of what the main letters equated to, and were asked to see what patterns they could find and to see if they could figure out how Roman numerals worked. It did not take them long to start to recognize the pattern in the groups of three letters and make the connections to addition and subtraction.