Community Service!

This week, we got outside to do some community service spring cleaning of our outdoor spaces around Lilja. It makes us sad to see the way people so carelessly dispose of their trash in our garden beds, on our playground and on our Lilja Trail. We took grabbers, gloves and trash bags around with us in an effort to beautify these places for all to enjoy. This type of stewardship is an important value we hope the kids will really take on as well as instill a desire to maintain and care for mother earth. They exclaim with disbelief at the detritus to be found blowing around the school yard and the building. But we were ready to roll up our sleeves and use some teamwork to tackle this problem.

These actions build community and  responsibility that we hope will take hold even as they grow into tweens and teens themselves. We hold these experiences as important as outdoor exploration and play in the fostering of love of and respect for nature.  As you are out in your neighborhood, you may see your child take notice of litter and want to do the right thing in picking it up - taking along cheap salad tongs for "grabbers" and a small bag can offer your child an opportunity to continue this mission!

Enjoy the pictures below of our nature activists in action!

Punctuation Study Author's Celebration

Today we wrapped up our Punctuation Study. Punctuation marks are the road signs a writer gives a reader to let them know when to stop, pause, say something with excitement, or stretch words out with suspense. Without punctuation, readers would not be able to read texts in the way the author intended making the work more confusing and less meaningful. 

During this unit, we looked closely at different types of punctuation in books and talked about what each type was telling the reader to do. From there, the goal was to be meaningful in the punctuation choices we made. Our young authors tried out ellipses, quotation marks, comma, colons, apostrophes and of course, different end marks. 

The kids were given choice of both the genre they wanted to write in as well as the topic. Some kids wrote nonfiction information books, others wrote personal narratives, while still others tried their hands at fiction. These choices brought new energy to our writing workshop while also allowing us to focus on a common craft element. 

At our celebration, small groups of children read their books aloud to one another, paying close attention to the new and interesting ways in which the writer had used punctuation. Our hope is that all these lessons will carry over into their daily writing as we get ready to start a new unit next week.

Enjoy the pictures below of our celebration!

Plant Package Engineering

 The 1-2s have been learning about technology and engineering. We have been specifically looking at package engineering and the functions packages need to perform for the good of the product as well as to engage the consumer. Packages need to fill many functions such as protecting the product to keep it safe, preserving the product to keep it fresh/healthy, containing the product, displaying the product itself or use other visually appealing packaging, communicating information to the consumer about the product (what it is, how it is used, nutritional information, warnings, etc.), dispensing the product (such as through a pump or spray) and an element to assist with carrying the package (think of the built-in handle on a milk jug). 

The challenge for the kids was to transform a base package (a 2 liter bottle or quart carton) into a package that would keep a plant safe, healthy, and contained over a period of days as well as to display the plant for the consumer to view and provide communication to the consumer about what the plant is and how to take care of it. 

See the pictures below showing the packages each team created. Next week, we will score the effectiveness of the packages by checking the health of the plant, rating the clarity of the communication and performing a "shake test" to determine the stability of the container.