September 23rd, 2020

 Rainey A

In addition to spending plenty of time on our favorite activity; building, Rainey Room A enjoyed branching out to a variety of fine motor activities. For some, sewing was the choice of the day with Lochie, Elle and Violet all using letter beads to spell their names on the fabric. For others, like Jack, building an “animal house” took up the majority of the morning. On the playground, we all enjoyed the popular obstacle course building, and today we added a new twist. With Jack and Lochie’s suggestions we spaced out some of our building materials so that in order to cross you have to jump from point A to point B. As Lochie repeatedly reminded his friends “we can’t jump on the lava!”. 

Given that we’ve spent a fair amount of time planning, designing and constructing obstacle courses, the remainder of this week and next will focus on responses to questions such as “What is an obstacle?” “Where have you seen obstacle courses before?” and “ How does it make us feel when other friends use our obstacle course?”. The hope is our class dialogue around these topics will guide as a class in our future ventures.  

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Elle (above) and Violet (right) work on sewing a one of a kind pieces for their portfolio drawers.

"It's a volcano with lava inside!" George exclaims as he examines his construction 

Rainey B 

Today we continued our exploration of stability in our construction corner. The children practiced building structures together with various types of materials. Our goal today was to see how high we could build our towers with limited space and resources. We realized that heavier pieces made stronger bases and that being patient made it easier to balance smaller pieces as the worked progressed. 

​"I can balance these because they're hard" - Cedar
"Slowly. Watch. We don't want to knock it over" - Jane

In the afternoon we continued our exploration of music by listening to traditional Kenyan music Cedar wanted to share with the group.

We have also been studying light as it reflects into the classroom and creates rainbows throughout our space. With that in mind, our students used water colors to create their versions of the rainbow and explore color. Equally important, we discussed the importance of respecting other people's art and came up with a classroom expectation:

"We don't touch other people's work because it is special"