As the summer session is winding down the students are finishing up their reading books (Aurora County All-Stars and the second Cam Jansen book). They are also finishing their written stories, "A Day In The Life Of A Prairie Green Student". It's been fun to see the the students be amazed at how much they can accomplish over these four weeks. They are very proud of those days they are able to get everything done on their "To-Do" list!
Each week the students have been working in their math books at least 20 minutes a day. They like setting the timer and working at their own pace. Using these math books worked well because if a student had a question, they could ask me or a Prairie Green student since they are the same books we use. Most of the math the students have been working on are concepts they had already been taught but need more practice with. Most of the students' questions were easily answered with short instruction which worked well during transition times.
The kids love the anchor activities. The two favorite activities are the ArchiQuest, which are fun-shaped blocks to build with, and the story telling cubes. The story-telling cubes do attract all ages so I have heard some very clever storytelling adventures.
Each day, I always make sure the younger students have time for imaginative play while at recess. This year I am going to keep track throughout the year and assemble a book of all the"games" they play. So far this summer there has been "The Rodeo", "The Vampire Moon Fairies" and now this week was "Farm". There always seems to be a few of the same characters no matter what the game changes to.
For art this week, Judd focused on motion. We discussed and demonstrated what people look like in motion. It's easier to draw an person or and animal in motion but he challenged the kids with asking how we show that a car is in motion. The students had a few ideas...show smoke coming out of the back of the car or draw the background to show the car is driving to a store. If using a medium such as chalk, you could draw a blurry background to show the car was moving or you can put a flag on the car and show the flag standing up to show the motion. To introduce what we were going to draw, each child was able to go to the front of the class and strike a pose of an Olympic sport. We had a gymnast, diver, shooter, fencer, soccer player, etc. Then the students got to choose which Olympic athlete they wanted to draw, Lolo Jones, the hurdler from Des Moines, or Michael Phelps. Michael won and we all went to work drawing him doing the butterfly.