On Thursday we were very fortunate to have Zac Cota, an Americorps volunteer with North Branch Nature Center who joins us each week for ECO, visit our classroom to help us tag some of our butterflies.  Each tiny sticker tag has a 3 letter and 3 number identification.  Connected to this ID is information about where the butterfly was tagged, whether it was caught in the wild or raised from a caterpillar and then released, and whether it is male or female (males have small black dots on their lower wings).  Today we tagged 2 females and 1 male.  If they are found by researchers in Mexico Zac will be notified and let us know!

Several weeks ago we started writers workshop.  We began by reading the book Library Mouse by Daniel Kirk.  In this book a mouse named Sam writes books for the children who visit the library and helps them realize that writing is fun and not so hard if you write about what you know.  Right now most students are telling their stories primarily with pictures.  We also read the book Ish, by Peter Reynolds.  This is about a boy who makes drawings that don't always look exactly like he wants them to, but they are "ish"- flowerish, fishish, birdish etc.  We have discussed the importance of just trying, knowing that the only way to get better at something is to practice.  (Several kindergarteners have been wonderfully generous about telling me that my own drawings, when I model writing, are very "ish"!)

As we keep learning letters and corresponding sounds children will be writing more and more independently and I will be scribing less.  For now I encourage children to elaborate on their thoughts by adding details to their pictures, adding more pages ( we have talked about making sure pages share a common subject) and writing any letters or words they may know.  We have all been writing "I" when we write about our weekends each Monday.  It has been really fun to see how engaged children are during writing and how eager many are to try writing their own words.

We had another lovely ECO session on Wednesday.   Our focus for the morning was building red eft houses.  (Red efts are juvenile eastern newts.)  In the past we have made mouse houses,  but with an abundance of red efts in the forest it made sense to build "houses" for these young salamanders.  (We even had one walk across our safety circle during our story about a red eft.)  On Tuesday students had an opportunity to create plans for their houses, being as creative and elaborate as they liked.   While the finished creations don't necessarily match the initial plans, the planning process definitely seemed to deepen engagement and attention to detail, with many children eager to add more to their houses in the coming weeks.

We have been fortunate to have 7 monarch caterpillars in our classroom.  They are incredibly fascinating and fun to watch and we have used them to practice habits of good scientists including observing, drawing, and perhaps most importantly questioning.  Some of the things students noticed were that the caterpillars have black, yellow, and white stripes, they have lots of legs, they grow fast, they eat a lot, they walk upside down, they have four antennae,  and sometimes two caterpillars will go on the same leaf.  We also thought of some really good questions:  How do they walk upside down?  How do they shed their skins?  How do they grow and change so fast?  How do they attach themselves to a leaf or the ceiling before they turn into chrysalids? How long will they be chrysalids? Where does the gold on the chrysalis come from?   How can they go from black, yellow, and white to black and orange?

We had a great first day of ECO on Wednesday.  Our morning centered on learning specific ECO routines and expectations and exploring our ECO space.  All of our expectations fall under the broad umbrella of the three cares:  take care of yourself, take care of each other, and take care of the earth. Some very specific expectations we learned were the forest boundaries, how to be safe around the safety circle (where we eventually will have a fire),  and how to treat living things in the forest.

Each week we follow the same general structure while varying our games and activities.  When we first get off the bus we stop in the field where we greet each other, share something we are thankful for, sing a song, and play an active game.  We then make our way up to the forest, using our senses to notice changes in nature or interesting observations along the way.  When we arrive in the woods we gather around our safety circle to share these nature notes, eat snack, and listen to a story.  This is followed by our guided exploration for the week.  Some weeks we may have time for some forest choice before gathering back together to say goodbye and thank you to the forest and walking back to school.  Parents are always welcome to join us!

One classroom routine that is now well established is math, which follows morning meeting each day. Children work in small groups and move through a variety of stations.  The groupings change regularly, providing students an opportunity to work with different peers.  The stations tend to be hands on and almost always include manipulatives for children to use.  We have spent our time in the first two weeks exploring materials, recognizing numerals, and counting sets up to 6.  Soon we will expand to numbers up to 10 and begin playing some fun partner games.  Ask your child about a favorite station so far.