why some trees are always green

in my last entry i talked about how the week flew by, but this week flew by even faster. here i am on monday...trying to remember all of the events from the past week before another one starts again. let's see if i can recap it all.

(oh, on a side note, our SCA crew made it on one of the SCA website, check it out: http://www.thesca.org/hands-on/2010/01/see-whats-tap-2010. paraphrasing one of my friends, i'm the silly one in the front with the hair).

MONDAY

a planning day as usual.

TUESDAY

started the morning off with 6th grade. our lesson on food security went well! after a discussion of some of the key terms in the food security world, we broke the class up into groups (representing villages) and assigned them to the task of coming up with a name for their village and deciding what they wanted to plant in their 10 fields. there were lots of nuances (how much each crop would yield, the different types of crops, whether it was a wet year or a dry year, etc), so it was interesting to see how the different groups worked together. i've noticed that class works very well in groups. it allows them time to talk with other students while accomplishing something at the same time!

our next lesson was 4th grade. they built their own watersheds which was a lot of fun! they are such a good class...when they were done building and polluting their watersheds, we did some discussion about stormwater and played a fun game.

then we were off to lunch...art class with 1st grade...and then our lesson with 5th grade. that...was interesting. the topic of the day was trees. i started with the tree song, which was crazy. i saw a lot of them had enthusiasm...and a few of them lacked it...we eventually made the tree song work, but once they were back at their seats, the lesson went better. i read a native american story about why some trees are always green. those students did not know much about evergreens or conifers. it was surprising, but it made me glad that we were there to help them re-learn. they seemed to enjoy the story and relating the rest of the concepts from the lesson back to the story : )

back from winter break...

...and it has definitely been a busy week. 

MONDAY

monday found us lesson planning for some events on friday (even though i would end up snowshoeing and clearing trails all day at some land trust properties) and lesson planning for the week. caleb and i seemed to zoom through everything and even made prototypes for our water molecule hats (to be explained later).

TUESDAY

on tuesday morning, we had fun scraping a thick layer of ice off the van before we even left the forest. getting down the driveway was also quite interesting...once we got to school, caleb and i ran around getting some last minute tasks done. we taught a lesson in 6th grade on ethical reasoning with environmental issues. we first asked them what they knew about global environmental issues and what they wanted to know (KWL assessment: know, want to know, and fill in what they learned after the lesson or unit). at first, they seemed unsure of what they wanted to learn much about environmental issues. after the KWL, we split the class into groups to discuss environmental dilemmas. the groups worked very well! since the class enjoys talking in general, organized discussion was perfect. after the students discussed their dilemmas for about 20 minutes, we brought the class back together to debrief and see what they gained from the discussion. from the responses, the students displayed a growing curiosity about the complexity of environmental issues. one student even asked, "does this problem really happen?". others appeared rather shocked that finding solutions to these dilemmas can be complicated and nuanced. caleb and i are very excited for our next lesson with them!!

we then helped with 1st grade with reading...they have so much energy...

our 4th grade lesson on properties of water went so well! the students are curious about water and seemed to be fully engaged in learning about properties of matter and the amazing qualities of water. they loved making water molecule hats and even wore them to lunch!

during 1st grade art class, i got hit by the tired bus...and the kids were rowdy. one didn't want to cut out his coyote at all...i tried to use some of the responsive classroom language with him, but it didn't work.

afterward, we headed to 5th grade. half of the kids left for choir soon after our name game, but the small class was great. we played lots of games (paperclip game, seismologist, mechanic's coming). they had played most of the games in some form or another before, but they seemed to love our versions!!