Welcome back everyone! It was great seeing so many of your smiling faces and I was so excited to get back to our learning.
It was a Monday, so that meant a trip to the library. Anja saw that I picked out our new chapter book, but she said I should hide it so it was a surprise to everyone else. Gia was excited to read her book, since it was about birthdays and her dad’s birthday is coming up soon. Rebecca, on the other hand, figured that her book was called ‘Hugs’ because of how many hugs were in it. Timo pointed out that his book was ripped and, when he looked for his next one, he double checked that the new book wasn’t ripped. Sokrates saw that his book’s title ended with an exclamation mark, but he wasn’t sure why; after we talked through it, he realized that it must be because the book was exciting! Paolo had read his book before, so he knew that it was a good one. We were great members of the library today and I was so proud to have these learners represent Plato Academy.
We started our new book today, Stuart Little. I knew there were some people that weren’t here today, so the text can be found here (please don’t read ahead at home, just so we all stay on the same footing). Tove noticed right away that there was a mouse, just like in Despereaux. Niki thought the cover was funny, since mice can’t ride in ‘canoose’ (props for knowing that term on her own). Today we met Stuart and his family. We also got to see Stuart venture into a bathtub drain to get back his mother’s ring. We used what we learned to start filling out our Character sheet, which we will use to track and describe the characters we meet. Anja wanted to add the word ‘brave’, since it must have been hard to go down in the dark drain alone. Yianni suggested tiny, since he was obviously a very small mouse. I already heard some of these character words working their way into our conversations and chapter pictures. Speaking of chapter pictures, we are stretching this term to use two or more sentences to describe our pictures and to include letters in our writing. I can’t wait to see how this helps us learn!
Couple of announcements. First, we are collecting change to help us practice counting and working with coins. Please, don’t send in more than around $5, but a variety of coins would be greatly appreciated. Second, don’t forget that we have off Friday and Monday April 9th for Orthodox Easter. Finally, and this is just as a thank you, I wanted to let you know that I got a series of blogs published talking about the work that we’ve done. I got in contact with MathAtHome.org and they were interested in hearing about the work we did on graphing a few months ago. The first blog went up today and can be accessed here. This is definitely more from an educational perspective, but it is a peek inside how our explorations are designed. Thanks for being part of this experience!
