Who Is This Baby?

Can you guess which Owl teacher started their life as this adorably puffy baby? We asked the same question to our Owls this morning at morning meeting. Friends were asked to choose, and write their name down in the column that correlated to their choice. Thus, the Owls were introduced to the concept of graphing. As more people guessed, the graph filled up, and when one column became more filled than the others, it was clear that this choice was the biggest and most popular choice.

In the end, most guesses were for Mike. "The baby has black hair like Mike."

But what is the true answer?

 Stay tuned until next episode for the conclusion of "Who Is This Baby?"!

As we were playing in the block area, friends began to wonder what a particular animal was. Was it a sheep? Was it a goat? Mike even asked "Is it an alpaca?" and got a quick response from Wills of "Now you're just making things up!" 

To prove that alpacas do, in fact exist, Mike pulled out his laptop and looked up pictures of alpacas. We printed one out, but also printed out a picture of a sheep.

Friends then went around with the plastic animal and the pictures, asking classmates which they thought the animal was. We even decided to apply what we learned this morning to make a graph of the guesses.

 We were payed a visit by first grade today. They told us about how they began to study post offices (much like our letter writing study!) and are creating their annual Lower School post office. They are making mailboxes for each class, and are going to be delivering mail throughout the entire school, which means that if the Owls write letters to friends throughout the other classes, the letters will get delivered! We will use stamps that are made by the first graders and need to mark the destination of each letter. After the first graders left, the Owls excitedly got to work writing letters!

And finally, we had a triple birthday today! Wills, Tori and Pharaoh turned 5, 4, and 4 (respectively). We celebrated with special snacks and lots of hugs. Happy birthday, friends!

Other Owlings:

Playing whisper down the lane at morning meeting

More board game fun!

Rainy day stroll through the school

Autonomy Within the Game

For the past few days, the Owls have been very excited to play the game Zingo, brought in by Penny. This excitement has ridden the recent trend of playing cooperative board games in our classroom. These cooperative games have been wonderful, and Tamara has blogged about the lessons they offer before. Although the cooperation from these games is a wonderful thing, these lessons have needed teacher support to be scaffolded into the joy and fun of the game: usually small disagreements rise among the players, and a teacher is needed to intervene and keep the peace.

Well, friends, today we had a breakthrough. While a small group was playing Zingo today, after the game started and everything was set up, the teachers left the group by themselves. Did they wait for the teacher to come back before continuing? No. Did they argue about whose turn it was? No. Did they bicker about who was winning? Not our Owls! What they did do was...was just keep playing. One of the players took charge of who was calling out the chips (with no more than a blink from the other players) and they just kept on having fun. 

 

Players cycled through, and occasionally a teacher would need to come over to offer support, but for the most part, the gamers enjoyed independent harmony together. This autonomy was a joy to see, and is just one of the first steps in a process that allows children to feel comfortable with independence.

We also visited Jason in the music room today. He set out an array of different drums for us, and introduced us to the sounds and rhythms that they can create. Each Owl had a chance to try multiple drums.

Experience Owl drumming...with sound!

Other Owlings:

Owl Classroom: Extreme Makeover Edition

In a meeting the other day, the Owl teachers discussed strategies to encourage new kinds of dramatic play in our classroom. We realized that Owls have for a while now loved to play chasing games and animal games in that area, but what could be done to challenge them in new ways? Then it hit us: classroom makeover! So today, we shifted around some things in the far end of the room.

 

Upon exploring, you'll notice that the cozy box that we made earlier in the year has shifted to a more central position. The play kitchen appliances have shifted, as have many of the dress up props. Together, this has created a new, more intimate dramatic play area.

We transferred our large platform blocks out into the hallway and moved our blocks shelf over. We acquired more blocks from our downstairs storage area (we also grabbed a few fun new toys from there, including a small play farm), so we cleaned off another shelf to hold the new additions. The shifted shelves open up our back corner in a very big way, and the idea behind this is to encourage more elaborate buildings with the unit blocks with the use of many different building materials.

Before we moved our platformed blocks to the hall, we wanted to keep track of the blocks we had in our room, since this was only a temporary action. We organized the blocks by shape, then counted them all. Friends took down the data for our official Owl records.

Other Owlings:

Babies like to....

"The jungle and the bridge to Earth"

More Zingo!

Building a car

Bake Me A Sculpture

Today, Sam visited us. She brought baker's clay to us, which is a very simple, easily made-at-home clay. Sam told us that we were going to be making sculptures. Wills informed the Owls that sculptures are "like mini statues" with their 3-D design. She also brought us food coloring so that we could color the clay whatever hues we wanted, along with pipe cleaners and toothpicks to incorporate different materials into the creations. Friends very much enjoyed mixing and blending the colors, manipulating the clay, and adding "decorations" to their statues.

We also played "Zingo", which is a variation of bingo that is very appropriate for our Early Childhood friends.