conversations with kindergartners.

i forgot to mention some adorable conversations with kindergartners on thursday in art class. they were making snowpeople collages (cutting out shapes of paper and gluing them down to a big piece of paper).

art teacher: what is the shape of a carrot?

kindergartner: BLUE!

art teacher: that's a color.

--

(when cutting out circles for the snowpeople bodies)
kindergartner: i accidentally made an octogon.

--

me: (helping a student add some more details) what shape would you make the arms?

kindergartner: BROWN!

me: that's a color.

they'll learn someday...

it's really february already?

this week's entry is going to be a bit abbreviated as i'm trying to recover from an icky cold. but, exciting news! i reformatted some aspects of the blog to make it more robin-ish and now have a functioning link to some photos. 

MONDAY
planning day. yup. learned some wilderness skills: building a fire and making rope.

TUESDAY
morning...6th grade. went well! enjoyed discussion and systems activity.

4th grade. polluted water (using vegetable oil, food coloring, leaves and soap). hooray! came up with good solutions to clean the water.

1st grade art. c-r-a-z-y.

5th grade. water cycle review. much better than last week!

WEDNESDAY
felt like poop in the morning.

a moose visited preschool (aka i dressed up as a moose named alice. the scientific name of a moose is alces alces). amazing fun! afterward we made moose hats : ) great time.

kindergarten...lesson was okay. all the students wanted to do was make purple water.

lunch and recess (played basketball with kindergartners as much as you can actually play basketball with kindergartners).

2nd grade. animal charades. fun times. short lesson.

made a bee costume! hooray!

nature club = success.

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 : )