Story plays and kelp forests!

Today brought a pair of year-end Celebrations of Learning in the Elementary Division. Tomorrow will be the 1/2 classrooms' year-end presentations; Monday brought Temescal Creek's (3rd grade) publishing party, which I unfortunately saw only briefly and in passing.

In Cerrito and Strawberry (4th/5th grades), the classrooms held a combined showcase of their work and learning during the current Oceans Unit. One portion of Strawberry Creek was transformed into a kelp forest, while Cerrito Creek centered around a tidepool. Both classrooms featured student-written animal reports, with additional activities including a "seagull dissection" emphasizing the impact of the pacific trash patch, live krill for inspection, paper plate models depicting the relative amount of water, land, etc covering the earth's surface, and ocean-related poetry.

In Sweet Briar Creek (Kindergarten), students finished their literature unit on Fairy Tales by putting on a Story Play titled "Good vs. Evil", which they had collectively written. At the conclusion of the play, they answered questions from audience members that ranged from "How did you resolve disagreements about what ideas to include?" and "What parts of this play remind you of other fairy tales?" to "What flavor cake did they eat at the end?"

Today's K-8 Assembly: drama, leadership, science, poetry, and music!

Today's K-8 assembly was incredibly fun! After Mitch welcomed the students, the program began with a skit presented by the 7th grade students focusing on the ideas of inclusion/exclusion, cooperation, and comfort talking about these difficult topics. Check out the script written by Norman Johnson, TBS's very own Middle School Drama Teacher!

This was followed by a pitch from last year's Student Council members about the exciting experience of being on the council, and setting the stage for the selection/election process that will take place in classrooms during the next two weeks.

At each assembly, one or more classrooms presents a Showcase of Learning, in which they talk about recent classroom experiences and academic ideas they have been learning and thinking. Today's SoL featured students from Wildcat Creek (6th grade), sharing information from their Science curriculum about the composition of the Earth, and also reading original poems they've written in the style of Billy Collins' work "On Turning 10".  

The last piece of the assembly was a body-percussion experience led by Owen Roberts, TBS K-8 Music Teacher. He taught first a simple two-beat clap rhythm; then a second, four-beat snapping rhythm; and then a third, eight-beat body drumming rhythm. He split the room into groups and layered all three rhythms together, and then introduced a call-and-response element using just the chorus of "Hello Bonjour" by local artist Michael Franti and Spearhead.

Classroom charts and print

Observing in the classrooms today, I was struck by the amount of text and language already appearing throughout the school. From student work to new vocabulary, and from activity instructions to the scribing of children's ideas, the classrooms are already bursting with the language of thinking and learning!

Readathon Week author visits

Yesterday and today saw three terrific literary-based presentations, in our run-up to tomorrow's Readathon.

 First, Olivia Hackett-Shaughnessy wove stories together for our 2/3 and 4/5 classrooms. I was lucky to catch the first session; she began with a "pourquoi" creation story from Africa featuring an unlucky rabbit, the character of which she then connected to the Brer Rabbit stories of slaves in the American south. Next came a Brothers Grimm version of Rapunzel, followed by a Chinese ghost story from the California gold rush, and the concluding, at student request, with another scary story about Coronado and the search for the Seven Cities of Gold. Students and adults alike were captivated by the way she dropped into characters, switched out into narration, and pulled even further out to ask comprehension questions and give thinking prompts. Olive also sent us this lovely note afterwards:

I always wish I had said something after I leave a performance. Never fails.
  This time it was to your students and teachers--and you.
  The measure of kindness the world around is how a community welcomes a stranger. By that measure,
you and your school are a shining example of community. Please share that with all.
  What a delightful experience.
  Sincerely, Olive

This morning, local author and illustrator Elisa Kleven stopped by to read and speak with the K/1 students. She read from her work, shared the process by which she writes stories, and answered student questions about her art. Elisa visited as part of our Readathon week run-up two years ago, and like then she stuck around to sign and write individualized inscriptions on copies of her books for students.

The Middle School was not bereft of an author visit, either: long-time TBS parent Lillian Howan (two children are graduates, and the third is in 8th grade) read two of her stories and hosted and Q&A with students as well.

Finally, many many thanks to the parent volunteers - chiefly Jean Marstens, Brigitte Durell, and Chrisy Ponte, though others helped too - for pulling off the third annual TBS Book Swap today!

Images from the K-5 classrooms

In Cerrito Creek (4/5), students brainstormed "writing territories", or topics that they might want to write about for their next piece of short fiction.

In Sweet Briar Creek (2/3), students turned their recently finished poems into holiday gifts by adding them to hand-painted canvases.

In Temescal Creek (2/3), students used a work period to paint holiday gifts...

...work on addition and geometry...

...and build models of molecules.

In Laurel Creek (K/1), students used a literacy workshop period for projects related to their study of author Jan Brett, including writing and illustrating stories...

...contributing to a class mural of events in Trouble with Trolls...

...and sewing giant mittens as in The Mitten.

Finally, in Strawberry Creek (4/5), students worked in small groups to read the Declaration of Independence and come up with laws that they felt would directly arise from that text.