Enrichment at RES: December 2015

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Horses

Horses are my favorite cinder of animal. I like black horses. And I have never gone horseback riding.

Have you gone horseback riding before?

Jasmine's awesome blog of everything

Hi!

My name is Jasmine, I love animals I also like science and technology and being scared.

Well that's all I need to say about me. Oh! Wait I'm in 2 grade

Here's two cool facts for you before you go

Did you know everyone in the world is made up of star stuff ?

Did you know feathers are a tipe of scale ?

Monday, December 14, 2015

Knock Knock Jokes

Knock knock

Who is there

The interrupting cow

The interrupting cow mooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I like. To play foot ball I play foot ball at school at recess. I like to play a lot of positions. I really like to play football 👍👍👍 and I like the patriots 😀😀😀😃😃😃 and I have been to a patriots game before It was very fun 👍👍👍😃😃😃😀😀😀😄😄I cried at the end of the game because they lost. 😭😭😭 and I was mad to😠😠😠

Foot ball

I like the patriots. My favorite players are Gronk and Brady. I like the them because they are really good at playing football. Gronk hurt his leg and for two games he could not play. Now he is back! What is your favorite team? The patriots are awesome!

Friday, December 11, 2015

Minecraft

If you kill a whither you will get a nether star. You can build a beacon with a nether star. I have not been able to build a beacon because it is really hard to kill a whither. Whithers chuck skulls at you and it really hurts! Have you ever gotten a nether star?

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

A Day in the Life of an Enrichment Teacher

One thing I love about my job as the enrichment teacher is that each day is full of learning and is different than any of my previous days teaching. Sometimes I pause at the end of a day and marvel at all that I have gotten a chance to learn and do. Today was one of those days. I began my morning with a professional development session with some of my teaching peers. I had the chance to hear what others are working on and was inspired by school wide engineering challenges (watch out RES, because after our talk now I want to do a school wide cardboard building challenge!!)

Next a teacher friend from another district came and helped me to install a harmonograph in the art room so that RES students can create.

As students smiled their way into the building I prepared my room for a morning of robot making with third graders. I also set up a voting booth so we could vote for the name of our new classroom cougar mascot. In third grade students are being creative as they build with many materials to design 2D robots with 3d features. This project is excellent in itself because of the collaboration and creativity, but it is even better because our long term goal is to make these robots light up when we begin our collaborative study of electricity in January. And we had an excellent discussion about the importance of voting if you would like your voice heard...and the idea that voting gave every student an equal opportunity to make a class decision.(This was a memorable discussion for me and I hope one that they will remember in ten years when they can vote!)

My next two classes were unique this week as school wide we are participating in an Hour of Code. I am lucky to be collaborating with teacher/librarian Mrs. Redford to make sure every student at RES gets a chance to code. Our first coding group was fourth graders. They were excited, but they also had questions about why coding was important. I love that our classrooms can be a place where students question why we are doing something. There is so much power and learning that happens in respectful dialog. Students worked through coding tutorials and wrote upwards of 100 combined lines of code.

Next I went to the cafeteria for my duty as a lunch monitor. I am there to make sure lunch runs smoothly, but the part I like is chatting with second graders. In this environment I often hear about the things that they are most enjoying about school, and it gives me a chance to understand them better. We have also been sharing Knock Knock jokes, and I am building up quite a bank of good ones.

After lunch I got a chance to code with a second grade group. This group was excited, but once we started coding many students became discouraged. This was the youngest grade that was using a tutorial and it was challenging....but they did not give up and about half way through kids were coming up to me telling me how it was hard, but good, or hard, but they liked figuring it out. To me this is great learning --- and to have them vocalize that tension between a challenge and success and failures was awesome.

Next I visited kindergarten. Students had requested that we build, and so I came with lots of boxes and tape. We worked in a small group to design a space rocket house. Students worked together with joy for forty minutes, and when I left were making plans for additions during their next work opportunity.

My last class of the day was first graders. We are continuing our study of community, and today we were learning about a community helper we were interested in. We were lucky to have a police officer come in to work with one group, and I learned a lot about how outside community engagement spurs learning. I also learned that some student groups do not work well together, even if they share a common interest, and I went back to the teaching drawing board to figure out how I can improve this collaboration for next time.

Whew! The school day ended for students with a chance for me to take my group out to their bus...saying goodbye and hearing about tidbits of their day...and then back into the building to meet with special educators and hear ideas for how to better meet the needs of all of the learners in our classrooms.

Everyday is different and everyday is full of great learning. Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to be a teacher at RES!

Who is Writing this Blog Anyway?

For the last two weeks the Enrichment at RES blog has been taken over by students! Second graders have been using the blog as a forum to post their ideas on everything from fish to Minecraft to American Girl Dolls! After spending several enrichment classes learning about blogs by paper blogging and commenting, students were ready to create their first posts. This has been very exciting for students as they think about their voice being heard beyond our classroom walls. What do they want to share? Who will read their work? How do they create something interesting for their audience?

Over the next few weeks second graders will continue to blog. We would love to receive some comments. In fact we will be tracking how many comments we receive.

In order to comment, you can sort blog posts by using the sort feature on the blog to search for Grade2, or by classroom teacher name.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Community Helpers

In first grade enrichment students are continuing to think about community. We began our study of community focusing on our school, but now we are taking time to learn about a bigger community...our town. We are all part of our town community because it is where we live!

I asked students to think about all of the community helpers that are part of Richmond. Their list was a big one and included: police officers, firefighters, mailmen, farmers, chefs, construction workers, teachers, librarians, veternarians, doctors, dentists and more! I was amazed and proud of how many strong connections students made to our town community. Next students used some great school resources to investigate a community helper they were interested in learning more about. Students used Pebble Go (online books provided by the RES library), Scholastic Community Helper online books, and many library books. We created a bulletin board for the enrichment classroom that lists interesting facts about a community helper. Did you know the police are here to keep us safe? Did you know that vets have a hard job because the animals they help cannot tell them what is wrong? Did you know firefighting can be dangerous? Students worked hard to share their learning.

Over the next week students will research even more about a community helper of their choice, making a poster to share their learning. Today we had a special guest when Police Officer Brett Lindemuth visited our class to answer questions about his job.

Do you know a community helper who would like to talk to our first graders? They love making these connections.