Savasana

Our days in the 1-2s start with a deep breathing practice to help kids calm down the high energy of a fast paced morning to a more calmer, more relaxed state that helps to improve focus and lessen anxiety. One such deep breathing exercise is savasana. This involved students laying on their backs with their arms laid out beside them, their hands open and upward. Their legs are laid straight out and their feet relaxed out to each side. Their heads rest with faces up and eyes closed, imagining their quiet place. Students are then guided through long, deep breaths as they (hopefully) achieve a relaxed state of mind.

Slowly, after many minutes, they begin to wiggle their fingers and toes to draw their minds and bodies back to the present moment at school. They push themselves up to a seated position and are ready to take on the day! Many kids were able to verbalize how they felt both during and after this practice. Many describe a sense of calm (some SO calm they were nearly asleep!), while others tell about the difficulty it took to bring themselves to that level of peace. Either way, they feel refreshed and restored once savasana is complete. It becomes a style of deep breathing that they often request  in seeking out a quiet to the thoughts flitting through their busy minds and/or the fidgety energy looking for an outlet.

Check out the pictures below of our savasana session (and keep scrolling for two cool creature finds from Free Friday today!).

Free Friday!

Once a week, we like to give our young adventurers a chance to enjoy themselves outdoors. This unstructured time to explore and play freely helps them to build confidence, to take small risks, and to strengthen friendships with peers - all with two teachers on hand to supervise and step in to guard against any dangerous situations as needed. Children may get a few scrapes or scratches in the course of their adventuring but that is no more harmful than the expected wear and tear that is part of the world of active children. If our hope is for these children to grow up to be stewards of the outdoors, we need to give them a chance to enjoy and build an appreciation for it.

Today's Free Friday time involved lots of Harry Potter play. Sticks make for powerful wands, as long as you have a good spell at the ready, and there were lots of young witches and wizards dueling it out! Our potion masters were gathering dry grass for its magical properties. Other escapades involved rolling down hills and spinning as mini-hurricanes. A few ambitious climbers tried their skills on some low hanging tree branches. Some of our budding geologists attempted to unearth a large stone from the ground. Fans of the Disney Channel's Descendants series took on some role playing with magic of a different nature.  And our "veterinarian's office"was (happily) able to resuscitate some cats who had used up their nine lives!

Good spirited fun was had by all on what will prove to be among the last glorious days of summer.
Enjoy the pictures below!

Getting in the Reading Zone

Over these first few weeks of school we have been launching routines to get our learning up and running.

In our reading time,  kids have been finding a good reading spot that allows them to really get into the reading zone (they often don't even hear us call clean up once they're in the zone!). They have also been trying out different books in the classroom libraries to find ones they are interested in as well as those that are a good fit for them as readers. Students have been paired with a reading buddy who they can read with, talk about their books with, practice their oral reading with and support each other as they learn new strategies for decoding words and understanding text.

As readers, we are working on developing good habits:
-Giving our books a "sneak peek" using the cover, back, inside flap and first few pages to give us a sense of what might happen in its pages.
-Checking our sneak peek predictions as we read to see if we were right.
-DOING something at the end of reading a book like rereading a favorite part (or the whole book!), thinking back on the events of the story, or retelling the book to someone else.
-Reading more and MORE to build stamina.
-Setting goals to read more than we did yesterday.
-Rereading sentences, pages or whole books to make our reading more smooth and with expression.

Check out the pictures below of our 1-2 readers!