The Rookery

We had a wonderful first day as the Herons.  From the first moments out on the plaza, we work carefully to create a classroom community that supports the kind of learning we need to do.  The fifth graders greeted the new students enthusiastically and effortlessly took them under their wings.  As hokey as it may seem, developing a sense of what it means to be a "Heron" enables the class to take more risks intellectually.  In the coming days, we will be writing and re-writing a series of statements of what we believe about our classroom.  That process, along with our guided recess games, meeting conversations, and story telling set up the expectations of the classroom, expectations that go far, far beyond any list of rules that I could post.

After the initial few minutes of supply sorting, we had a very typical day in the Herons.  We began with independent reading, had a math lesson on data collection, worked on our initial mini-theme (trees), had a read aloud, and went out for P.E.

The math lesson is typical of our math workshops.  Students are all working on the same project but the work is customized for their experience.  Today, we gathered data about our classmates.  Students designed pictographs to share that information.  Those who had more experience with data handling were pushed to make more complex graphs.  Those for whom this was brand new received more step by step instructions, more examples, worked on a simpler template and got additional support for our educational assistant, Rachel.  In the third part of the assignment, students will use their data to create another type of graph.  Many fourth graders will create a bar graph, focusing on elements like the axes and intervals.  Other students may create a circle graph using a template or a circle graph from scratch using a percentage protractor.

Here are short videos of our first moments together and our math lesson: