The First Week: a 3rd/4th Grade Perspective
What a week! This week has been unlike any other first week of school I have ever experienced. I imagine that much of our school community felt similarly.
Our first day of school tested our readiness for weather, with storms threatening throughout the day (mostly at pick up and drop off, it seemed). It really ended up being a lovely day and I enjoyed following students to the yurts after they arrived.
We started our day with a Morning Meeting outside, as I plan to do each day this year. This practice comes from Responsive Classroom, an approach to social-emotional education and classroom management identified in the design stages of The Riveredge School. I have actually used Responsive Classroom for many years in prior settings, but have never had the privilege of working in a school where all of my teaching colleagues are also trained in the approach and using it in their classrooms as well.
Each day has started and ended outdoors, with some time in the yurts, interspersed with additional time indoors. Would you like me to quantify that? We have hiked between three and four miles each day, with our longest hike being just under a mile. I have heard absolutely zero complaints from anyone about hiking. Of course, when they are discovering the different animals that call Riveredge home, or hiking to a natural playspace, that tends to be pretty motivating.
Like most schools at this time of the year, much of our energies are being spent on getting back into school routines and getting to know our teachers and classmates. The Riveredge School is brand new and so are all the members of our school community! Much of this week has been spent exploring our new school: hiking the trails, discovering reading nooks, and seeking out play areas. We aren’t even close to being done, but have definitely covered a lot of ground (see above!)
Students have done a very nice job acclimating to reading in a slightly different setting than the typical brick and mortar school setting. We made it to The Pines for our reading time today and I expect students will look forward to that longer hike for future reading sessions. I really enjoyed our hike back to the main building (for water and restrooms), as I was able to learn about what students are reading and get a better sense of them as readers.
We took some time to talk about those three pillars of The Riveredge School: nature, inquiry and community. In fact, we turned that conversation combined with a conversation about our hopes and dreams for the year (another Responsive Classroom piece) into a math/literacy/social studies lesson. Students did a great job categorizing different elements of The Riveredge School into nature, inquiry and community. They also categorized their hopes and dreams into physical, social, academic and other. We then created a graph to illustrate what our classroom community hopes to experience this year.
What do you think came up as the #1 category? Physical: tree climbing, paddling, hiking, and more…It was a nice opportunity for me to help students understand how The Riveredge School is different from other learning settings and how it is the same. One thing that I loved about it was seeing them try to wrap their heads around what inquiry could mean for them. A great example of a student-led initiative was the invasive plant removal that started almost immediately and resulted in a giant bag of invasive plants leaving Riveredge for disposal. Several students joined in and talked about how this was something that they felt proud of at the end of the week during our Closing Circle (Responsive Classroom).
I have really enjoyed sharing lunch with our class, seeing the creativity of how different families have been filling the Bento boxes has been fun, too. Lots of nice, healthy meals have been coming in! So much of our activities have been about creating that classroom community and it has been really lovely to see these early friendships forming. Today, I taught them a song from my Girl Scout camp days: Make New Friends and Keep the Old. Maybe you know it? It is a nice simple piece:
“Make new friends and keep the old.
One is silver and the other gold.”
We even got in a couple of verses in round before needing to go to pick up for the end of the day.
Literacy is a pretty big deal for me, if you haven’t noticed (with my insistence that everyone reads for 30 minutes/day!) Thanks for making sure that your child(ren) bring a book each day to school, that is a great support. I also love read alouds- passionately. Right now, we are reading a favorite of mine: Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo. It is hard to express how absolutely hilarious this book is. I use read alouds for my own personal gratification, I must admit, but also to support reading comprehension. There is nothing like sharing reading as a class and discussing our responses to that reading. So far, I have been impressed with student predictions, inferences and conclusions for this text. We have had some great conversation as well as some great illustrations! They are definitely paying attention.
As far as hardcore teaching goes, I have collected a few preliminary work samples to use for some baseline data to get a sense of where everyone is starting the year. Something I really loved is seeing students illustrate and label a leaf that they collected. We’ll be doing more with this, but the effort that they put into this task was very obvious. Today was rather windy, so it wasn’t going to be an easy task to complete outside and we ended up staying inside much longer than expected because they were so engrossed in their efforts.
It will be fun to see this class progress as the seasons march forward!
