Exploring Space and Time Survey Questions
2.14.09

Mesa School EST teacher participants have responded to two sets of EST
related surveys this year. Their responses yielded some common themes.
Can you respond to the following questions that emerged from this
process?

1. Is there value in providing multiple learning environments for
students? If so, can you elaborate further?

Yes, students that are not comfortable with abstraction and with vague exemplars such as "the Earth rotates around the sun, while rotating" at 6 years old need sometimes to see the profundity of such a notion. Actually so do the adults.

Hum let me just stay in my experiences of late. Recently I took a new class outside. The yard was "watching." I had the students do something I extracted from the project, they lined up , traced a partners shadow, it helped this was Groundhog's Day. I do like performance art.
(I was trained as an artist in the late 1970's, early 80's.)

And then they watched how in a few hours the shadow was in a different location. What was remarkable to me was these images lasted several days and the shadows were in very different places the next mornings and evenings as we "all lined up outside as demanded" and kids from all over remarked about this. Came to me to say things were "different" or "wrong" some who had my class last year were busily explaining this magic as the proof of Earth rotation. Some quite articulately.

I heard one bright child say, "Well look, if the sun is not moving around us we must be moving around that sun." It was fascinating to hear as those kids would not be having that conversation on that yard if we had not been out there inside that work. That was discourse from our work. Traveling through the children in a 600 plus kid school. In fact my own students thrilled to have created that observatory where they were employing terms like "science," "looking," "observation," it was the active engagement with seeing these notions affect them, their seasons, their shapes, the entire cycle of life took on a form. It energized.

But how can I just assert that? I am, however asserting it, having been a witness to it. I've never observed, in many years, something like that in the morning after a canned workbook science page.

Despite the fact I see teachers preferring the "ease" of a canned workbook, I see now that one thing working against me in my work-active engagement is frowned upon as teacher mis behavior and outside of the norm by a portion of the staff/system. It's almost a death nell to your career trying to go that route. It shows the lack of real training in the art of teaching I'm afraid, or the complacency with providing sub-par skills drills.

Look at that picture above, isn't that amazing? Kids were challenged to explain why those shadows in a short time were different, and from that we wrote later , mostly tons of questions. It's a beginning and as this project discusses time, the demarking systems of time such as hours, minutes, calendars, clocks we now use and it delves into our relationship to cycles and changes, it's really a very "real" and vivid experience.


But back to your question, I always use my student J to think it over. I taught him last year and it was so very challenging. This year in another room with other sets of teacher expectations he is being "trained." But what I had was a very young student that grappled with 5 disabilities, visual , auditory, you name it-it wasn't giving him dependable and reliable ways to express his meanings. He was as over wrought trying to be understood as he could be. Very active. Within this project he could kinetically demonstrate he had letters, understood a grid, he demonstrated concept of number, he divided, he employed coordinates and so on, largely by running to spots called out as we used the grid made for observation in a directional coordinate plane. It may seem "nice." But it was way more important than that. It gave him equity in access to understanding/content and gave me insight into his learning styles and abilities. Is that important? Not to his present teacher. Not ever enough to discuss it. Nor important to his this year pull out teachers who thought I was somehow too odd even discussing the insights. But to me it was everything.

Now he is centered on "self " control, there, I like to think he was centered on curriculum and expressing and demonstrating his unique gifts. It's an enormous problem with our teaching, one I too am working to improve. How do we get a child into the material. Show them as competent and even as insightful to a group? Computers might work well for this, but obviously hands on student centered and driven projects like this changes the dynamic enormously.

I believe you are also asking me here about "value."

Well, I believe what we do is something called making "choices." We make choices if we define learning as workbook drill aimed at mimicking the day the student takes the CAT tests for the state. We are literally training the student to understand the sole purpose of our institution is self preservation as we are "punished" if we fail to make the score. And that is the story of my site.

I believe in choices as I believe in notions of freedom. I think when we try different learning projects, try different ways of approaching what we do, we have the opportunity to reflect. To do better work. To be teachers over something I call the monitor.
What I see now is our school has changed, it's more mandated, more literal, more controlled. I see students less able to draw, less able to handle choice and often disrespectful and needing prompts and rewards, being bought. It's pretty logical to say we are choosing to substitute their finding out with our telling how and when. It has enormous implications in how they see school/self and how school performs.
It feels like it truly wants to create entitlement, frankly.

So this said, I value children being able to consider their Earth. To learn to ask and try to answer their own questions about this world. I like to be the mediator. I value times when my role is to notice with them, over tell them. I value finding ways to understand we can learn from what we do, or what is before our very eyes.

Suppose I did not know the Earth rotated around the sun or for that matter that the Earth itself revolved. But I did this project and I had, after a year, this giant figure eight from my observations. What would I make of it?

What if I didn't have a 7 day week yet but rather just one day following another, what would I make of this? What if time was not yesterday and tomorrow but today as it often is for my students? How would that affect my understandings? I ask myself questions all through the project. I puzzled for hours on where others fell on this grid we build, with all the directional points in a coordinate grid, why was one location recording it's data there, where was my data?

I asked and thought and build internally many '"visualizations" and I know this did this too for my kids. I watched them "get" their directional sense by relating to that play yard's giant compass. We went to the library, I asked them to point North and they closed their eyes, oriented, thought of the grid on our yard and the mountains, and then pointed north. One asked for a compass, so he was applying notions of tools we had used. It pointed me toward the choices I made in instructing them (and the fall out) and the value of those choices into their math learning, their science, their life skills. It was essentially for "value" I pursued the topic. A teacher, when allowed to be a teacher, arranges circumstances to allow a person to bloom. It's pretty obvious that that simple notion has scared people into removing from a teacher even the simple ability to make learning situational choices.

You know sitting here I am thinking that the children demonstrated cooperation, team work, lots of communication using the academic language, focus on task and so many of the buzz words I have to use now, but in a setting that was authentic, valid for them because it "did" something.

I would suggest the moving from lame textbook centered stuff to better quality ways to teach students both how to learn, and what to learn, while embedding it inside your curricular objectives in project based learning. More likely to work on the things that you are there to accomplish. Two birds, one stone.



2. If we categorized students into two groups; 1. self disciplined and
always engaged/motivated and 2: those with attentional challenges, can
you describe your observations and reflections on how these students
learn and participate on EST grid activities versus classroom
activities?

This year and last year the % of attentional challenges seemed inordinately large leading me to generalize that the world is "different now." That, perhaps, I don't fully appreciate what's going on.

I have felt that at least in my class second language issues, as well as the selection process that got them there, probably teamed up to give me a handful of challenges. But that might be just the inner workings of the teacher mind.....none the less, I know I have kids enthusiastic to get outside or to paint, move, have multiple things going on. It takes awhile in EST to, for instance, construct that outside observatory. That's a lot of students doing a lot of things in my case. Some going out to observe, others to paint lines, others to put down tape, carry clocks, use the compass, later use the mini models and tools to make circles, to employ things in pursuit of something. I think it might workjust as well, if we were building bird houses and going out to regularly watch and record, feed and count, assess birds. I think it would work using weather balloons and observing weather, lots of things, but I know that the acts of students engaging in a process to do something helps kids with attentional issues find ways to be positive and additive over needing to be distractive and finding they are too noisy or off task, distracting and detracting.

Within this project from time to time I found a way to channel a very divergent mind into a very helpful participation. Some of my finest observers are the children first inclined to notice some "difference" and very often that's a child often labeled off-task/inattentive. Active learning engagement is helpful. Look, we all know the limits that a classroom imposes on a young child, sit still, do what is asked.....in this project they had a way to bring to the spaces, vastly different spaces, focus in a little bit different way.
Here's a picture of that happening:

You just don't know what I know about it.

This chalk day was a ton of work, it was boiling hot, we had about one and 1/2 hours in the coloring in. Not one complaint until we were back in the room. A record. And students were successful in a variety of ways not least of which was being on focus.

Now in the year before, in EST, it was really a help to me when Dr. Puglisi took a day and took on small groups and some of the biggest winners were kids that were struggling in a "regular" academic setting. In fact they were able to really do a lot academically there.

3. Have you observed a difference between boys and girls in terms of
the frequency and observed comfort of asking questions or responding
to questions on the EST grid, If so, can you elaborate?

I wouldn't state it quite this way, no.
I noticed that boys generally were extremely energized. But I noticed kids making connections, surprising me, I noticed quiet thinkers, reflective behaviors, students that really expressed appreciation and valued the worth of it. From last year kids return to me and talked about what we did frequently. Girls and boys. What I did notice was I had disproportional numbers of boys with more overt reading and math issues that seemed to find understandings once material was embedded in a more doing environment. I noticed that.

4. What are your thoughts on the role of "hands on" learning in school?

I think they've just about made it illegal, where I work, and they have dis-empowered both instructor and student to such a degree it's almost criminal. I think that play, learning by doing, the discovery, the notions of mastery and of personal ownership of something as simple as counting are replaced by a workbook page that so closely resembles a state test...it's been a sad journey into undoing the best American education we once developed. From the wonders of the Frobel kindergarten to the Dewey notions we have picked the bones and cleaned them so that the child is a "product" and/or "client" and their learning something "delivered." Business.

I work where a tech coach wants to install a sen-surround sound system as if the child is locked in their chair for a showing at the theater, over giving them with the funds the individual chance to have a laptop. That's a seriously unbalanced perspective that has lost an understanding of hands-on learning. All kids are keyed to the Direct Instruction run through our projectors, ready set, it's Tuesday, let's all teach long A. It's so far from understanding hands on learning. But it should come as no surprise, where I am creativity died.

But I will wax on this as "me."
I think it's everything in empowering a learner. Hands on.
I think when a child actively engages from manipulatives, to building models, from creating schematics to droppping balls off a roof, from construction to playing a piano, drawing to singing, we start to build within the child the capacities that will help them to understand, visualize, imagine, create and respond in an ever more complex world. I do not think you can respond if all you have done is a workbook and that "on command." I think I have peers inordinately concerned with the "behavior" and "control" of the child, yet I see them valuing in their own personal children dance skill, drawing, mathematics, application into life. They really never tell me long involved stories about how straight their own child walked in a line over at their private school, yet I have a peer that spends I'd say about 40% of her time on that and very similar skills.

It's not that I advocate chaos either, I advocate understanding the relationship between "behaving" to get at the learning, over having nothing but behaving and then too much drill and needing carrots and sticks to drag a little one through it. First grade really should focus on keeping the wonder and joy of learning. Too many begin to see themselves as not doing well. That's pretty upsetting.

I only teach, or mainly teach, trying to find literature connections, models to be made, manipulatives to use, drawings to do, songs, just ways to connect whatever the themes are to productive doing. I am fairly Deweyian in that way, learning by doing. I learned a lot as a child because both my parents saw having the child (me) measure, weed, bake, measure, sew, make, and assist in the home, garden, in the application of skills. It was how they were going to get you to use that math, or get those patterns or figure out ways to apply it to something that helped you live. I cannot forget that.

One of the things I understand the least is why this is becoming "under suspicion."

Do we really see this less on a computer, not that my school has them for my kids? There on computers I saw my own children doing amazing things building virtually in ways that still simply take my breath. In general I'd say kids understand the value of hands on.That can absolutely happen on-line as a part of the learning within projects like EST.
Do adults really need their comfort so much as to remove that?

5. Has working on the EST project and in particular, the grid,
provided opportunities for you to be reflective about your teaching?
If so, please elaborate?

Sure, several thousand blogs full of reflecting (see above) and a ton of material I supplied into this process. I'd say the most interesting thing is the sheer grief I feel at the paving over and loss of that grid and my husband's removal of his teaching with me in this, this year compared to last. I often feel abandoned in the hood, working in a way not valued, and alone trying to help others see from the blindnesses of the last eight years of a full scale assault on learning nationally.

What this project did was bring me positively back to content driven work and embed my Standards in something that worked so much better than my writing on the overhead "Standard 3.0 Knows directions". And then I say them North, South, East, West in rote unison.

Look you don't entirely understand what happened at Under-performing places as "take overs" and schemas went into place. Unless you were in my situation. Saying "scientific" they took things they have no idea if it worked and no system other than these tests to measure and just imposed it with a great deal of ugliness.

( I like the way they made themselves but these two were mystified about the shadow movement)

So....kids need more than a workbook and a skill drill. And they come to us with huge, huge needs no one dealt with before all that well in part due to lacking the funds here in CA to do it well enough. Nothing dropped from the sky here to deal with that monetarily or any other way.

Want a clear proof?
The computers sitting in my room cannot load anything and are 14 years old. That proves in a technological universe where my kids are going to get off, yep, dead last. The poorest kids get the least. Period.

No affluent place would tolerate it.

We do things, they try, I don't down that. But this imposition stopped a District in her tracks. And I think, personally, froze her humanity and realigned her capacity to respond to her kids.

All that said, yes, I reflected in each lesson. I had hoped this year to do it again, looked forward to it, my husband's not doing it, well, it was very hard. And I alone find I cannot do it with the same degree of integrity. Too hard. Shame really. My teaching needs productive partnerships. I need to be inspired, aided and feel what I know and do matters. I just cannot be the tree down in the forest without feeling it. And finding it hard.

Kids ask us good questions ( but not always at the best moments).
At least my 1st graders do.
One asked me last, last week why our class map making was so really hard to accomplish and went on to express that it was difficult to "get it done right." Especially using this abjectly dysfunctional set of tools I had out to do it, a few crayons, rulers, and a very old idea.
You know the idea....We'd try to map "our room." Here's a pretty good one made by a very enthusiastic child, that's "her" on the Map:

Because I wasn't really sure (and I still am not sure) that they can abstract to a map I thought this might show me what they hadin the way of understandings. (Although in one training a year ago a man who has never taught, told us figuring out "prior knowledge was an enormous waste of instructional time") I still like to know where kids are developing, where are their understandings and how are they seeing schemas by having them show me drawing. That trainer Mr. Hollingsworth had a lot to be wondered about as he collected his consultant pay. He might do well to teach awhile, try living out his own theories in actual personal application across the grades on the other end of the stick. To me accessing prior knowledge is fairly worthwhile. As is finding out the capacities kids have evolved. I'm not a real "blank slater." Anyway, that's unimportant, what I was trying to see was if they were able to think of the view mapping requires that is an abstraction, the looking down. Generally mapping assumes they possess that as an understanding. We mapped first a few blocks out on some construction and did some looking via the internet at mapping. Trying to pont that out clearly and explicitly.

I brought in a few maps of Disneyland, The Santa Barbara Zoo and Magic Mountain too, noticing that they could use them pretty handily to explain to me "things they've seen." A great, great project I must do is treasure mapping. I almost forgot the fun of that.
A good follow up I'll have to plan ASAP. Another idea to follow up will be when I finally get it set up is this trip to the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens ( I want to take them to see the forest) where the map will help take us on the tour. I need to get that going.......ah stuff to do ever looms.

I remember making maps when I was young, of my state, of the yard, lots of applications. old days.



Google Earth has just transformed the old "My Place In Space" lessons.
What a wonder that is now. I cannot load it on the kid computers in my classroom and with budget issues 14 year old machines will stand like memorials to "what could be."
(they basically are to old to ever use as they won't load) but on my teacher station I can load it, as well as project it via the new projector. So we try to see it but it's dim to see.
I'm still not sure how to fully use this terrific tool, Google Earth. But I can fumble my way into showing our town and move around a bit here to there. That's incredible.
Downloading it has been intimidating enough... plus I can only think of my hometown to look up dreading seeing how it has changed as I myself experiment. I failed to recognize my own old house from over head, even my present house seemed odd. I guess we do see with the "mind's eye," quite a bit of reality has me still spinning looking down like this at my hometown, my present location but oddly our school was exactly like I picture it, really pretty ugly.

When your District allows you to use Google Earth with equipment per child available that can run it, this must transform school geography lessons. I cannot imagine. Or if you have the computers to run it (that I do not have) your teaching would be transformed. On the white boards that our tech person has personally prevented, it must just be absolutely stunning.
In a way I feel my lesson with the kids, drawing their room, a bit of the dinosaur now. Better I took pictures that we zoomed and then used as our starting place, then placing them on a "map." Yeah, we could use photo's in some way if I get the time to think.

Well, anyway we were in the process of trying to draw a room map after reading a sweet book called "Me on the Map" by Joan Sweeney from their reader.
Cute story with interesting ways of moving from a room in a house, to the street, to the neighborhood, to town, state, county, world views. There are several of these by this author, Me and My Family Tree, one about Time, and I recommend them all. Heartily.
Me and My Place in Space (Dragonfly Books) by Joan Sweeney
Me and the Measure of Things by Joan Sweeney and Annette Cable
Me and My Family Tree by Joan Sweeney and Annette Cable
Me Counting Time: From Seconds to Centuries by Joan Sweeney and Annette Cable

For some kids just now as we work I'm watching them understand this idea of "place" for the first time. It's all in a theme called Home Sweet Home , a part of ten themes we cover in 1st grade. One I don't mind at all except for the lack of time to do it well.

The interesting thing about the year is that I have arranged some art projects into the pieces in ELD, and into the reading, language arts, social studies units so that earlier in the year the children made large works of the neighborhood, as we worked forward to this theme. We started there in the ELD year, looking at our understandings of needs of communities and services, places we go, places we like. A commonality of how we understand the city and town functioning for people in these communal services. Until we got here to mapping.

Last week as this evolved we read another book. It began with the word "this."
And that took me to some very interesting lessons.
I have several This books.
One is Cherries and Cherry Pits,
an outstanding community builder I really love about a little girl that saves cherry pits to rejuvenate her neighborhood with cherry trees. You can read how much I do love it here. It is the perfect book for Black History Month.....and those blogs are coming soon.

The one we read about THIS.....was This Is My House. If you are a primary teacher add it to your collection. It'll blossom for you.



In this book they begin each sentence with This is my house....going to 22 locations drawn to show the diversity of homes on Earth, it's darling and the demonstrative pronoun "this" is so there. What is cool is that in 22 languages you learn to say and pronounce "This is my house" in that language. Fascinating for everyone. We read it many times to try to remember how to say something in another's language.
I really appreciate the immediacy of the child voice in that text.
There are many other great books on homes in my book box, here's a few I like:

Richard Scarry's Little Learners THIS IS MY HOUSE by Richard Scarry by Richard Scarry
Houses and Homes (Around the World Series) by Ann Morris and Ken Heyman
Victorian Doll House by Willabel L. Tong, Phil Wilson, and Renee Jablow
A House for Hermit Crab (Stories to Go!) by Eric Carle
Little Critter: This Is My Town (My First I Can Read) by Mercer Mayer
My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me by Maya Angelou and Margaret Courtney-Clarke
My House (An Owlet Book) by Lisa Desimini
The Napping House by Audrey Wood and Don Wood
A House Is a House for Me by Mary Ann Hoberman

The last one is a real personal favorite. I have it as a big book, it's a delight made at a time when books helped us imagine. And please try The Little House and if you have time read this review I once wrote. It's wonderful.

When I was "told" my theme would be "Home Sweet Home" in my 5th unit of study in 1st grade I thought of this book. Though I am not asked to think of anything. We read it for years gone by in primary classroom instruction, and I ordered it again to read when I had a moment for this unit. That time came today as the children in Room 10 listened for our "key vocabulary" and were enchanted as children have been since the 1940's release of a story about a house becoming obsolete, aging, being replaced by future building while in her day representing the best of her times and quite possibly representing a kind of beauty that can only be understood and appreciated within her true and original context.

This is a story of a beautiful Little House written by the genius of Virginia Lee Burton. She sits "way out in the country" built strong and sturdy, never to be sold for generations of a family to endure within her safe haven. She is happy, she is stable, but she “sees” the lights of the city and she is curious. At this point I feel it safe to interject as a young girl growing up in West Virginia far from city and growing up in the peace of country these words spoke to my heart. I wondered about the city too, wanted to know. I saw the changes in my world, saw future, recall first days seeing a tape recorder, recall the ideas of fast food and the movement of our life into the age of rocket and moon. A great story to explore metaphor with children. How are we like the Little House, how am I?

In the story the Little House watched the seasons, learned the cycles of nature and the book does such a lovely job placing the child reader or listener into this rural setting. For me it is a perfect telling of the naive Garden of Eden before the Fall construct, gamboling, rural, naturalistic with the seasons each illustrated and reinforced with charming traditional illustration for the child. But as the story unfolds the lights of city grow closer with changes entering text and illustration. I grew up with many of these changes, but it tells of horses replaced by roads and machine....Time is passing in the story, an age of mechanized progress enters the pictures.

Gasoline, speed, faster and faster are introduced as concepts that drive the forward progress around the Little House. She is now shown surrounded by track homes, darker clouds, and telephone poles. Crowding enters the page. Artistically it is busy, congested, more active visually, less peaceful. Now the Little House can't be sold, not because of the eternity of a family staying on her piece of land, but because a city has engulfed her and she has no worth relative to the expansion. She sits surrounded now pictorially by building. Written as it is, my classroom children found this "sad”, or asked repeatedly if she would "die". I kept saying let's wait a bit and see....but I knew their concern. It would seem headed for sad death. If I were to relate to the Little House metaphorically I feel myself as a teacher as these pages represent, surrounded by the mindless march of time. Looked at as valueless, seen as out of place in a world of "progress”. And the Little House misses her fields and flowers accepts this must be "the city" and wonders if she likes it or not.

I must admit I did stop reading here to ask children if they thought this was the life the Little House was "supposed " to live. One child speaking carefully said, " It is the life that she must accept." Another commented, "I know the Little House wanted to see the city but now she can't go back." Such it is when we leave Eden, such it is when the march of progress strips our naivety. Such is taking on our adulthood. Now we are to reconcile truth, reflect, make meaning and find ways to face what we must. To decide based on our rational mind combined with an awareness of things we could never have fathomed and indeed may not understand fully once revealed. The Little House stands swallowed by city, speed, time, and unable to feel season or know her truths at all.

Buildings are torn, replaced and destroyed around he….r as progress destroys what was replacing it with what is. Here my students shook with, "Oh no's" and statements like this one, "Oh she's going to die and never know her happiness." It is a point of despair, and interesting thing to place before children. Certainly this is the point in the story that I feel speaks with greatest power. And she decides that she cannot like this place that has grown around her. She has no way to relate to it. It is not a city able to even remotely understand what this Little House knew. Not even listening they are of two different worlds. And she admits sadness. She is filled with sorrow and becomes really broken down and lost.

The ending of the story is about hope. A many generation removed child of this house buys her again, restores and moves her far from city, back to country where she takes her knowledge within her walls and in the calm of the beauty of nature silently resumes her peaceful balance. Once more able to be who she is. Understanding in some way where she has been. Understanding now no longing for that other place. She has conquered longing.

To this tale my students sat in silence and in contemplation. I asked if they would like to draw this little house and all students, all, represented her in the country, in bucolic setting and at the bottom all wrote Home at Peace a phrase they asked me to spell. I'll post these when I find the digital camera. It’s a wonderful story fit for any 1st grade as relevant now as ever.

We move on so quickly in our pacing you cannot really develop meaning in the current "situation." No stopping to smell the roses, little house style. But these pieces are really good ones for the kids to explore.
Favorites.

I discovered with the use of "this" and "that" in my ELD lessons that children really struggled employing just those terms, so for several days we did lessons I thought were going to be easy, or even silly that turned out to be difficult and actually revealing and thus interesting.With more time I'd have developed a book making project. That's gone now too. No one makes anything now.
One day, during a teacher observation, I asked them to take a favorite crayon and say within a framed context, "This is my favorite color, blue," then going on with a partner, "That is your favorite color orange." One would think these demonstrative pronouns in this form super easy, they were not, and this frame took days during which I learned 1st graders struggle a great deal reversing from speaking of themselves to speaking of another's preferences.It required practice.
I learned that time is framed by "this and that" and that my students weren't so clued into those understandings.
I also learned about immediacy and about how we mark time in language and the benefit of my teaching to that verbal cluing in more explicit ways was necessary. I had presumed understandings. In fact since I am very interested in "change" in "time" and in growth I started to see the value in setting up more opportunities to take these structures I do see in the children's text, like the "this is" set up and employing it into actual child language practices.
We tried "This is my house and I like that it______." Among many other verbal ELD practices. So for a week we did a lot of "this and that" and it was interesting work.
I think for me the most interesting part was in understanding how reversing from say your own favorite into stating a partner's cause a real processing that was tangible. It hung in air.

This took me to recalling a book where this functioned rythmically.......
Bringing me to our Reading Rainbow reading of the Kapii Plain book , there "this" is employed with great reasonance through the text Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain (Reading Rainbow Book) by Verna Aardema

"This is the great Kapiti Plain all fresh and green from the African rain..."

....as the children explored a book and a show about myth structures/story for explaining life happening mysterious/wonderous things and scientific explanations by looking at the weather. Here our community has been experiencing rain, not at all common, and very exciting for children. This AM lightening and thunder actually rolled. Quite wonderful.
Children in 1st grade in my room are in weather units so in some way all of this kind of ties loose ends or pulled together into good connected learning, a rareity in workbook days. Making daily weather observation journals out of calendars I wish I had picture taken to show.

We mapped our model homes on our "dividers" (so we can work in privacy) in table neighborhoods, these need a bit of finishing but are very cool...

Well there we have it, just a look in at my Sheltered Immersion 1st grade. What's happening!