We had lots of fun Wednesday afternoon in our school-wide Gifts for Giving event.  Children had an opportunity to choose from nine different gift making stations.  I won't tell you what they were in case you are the intended recipient of the gifts, but everyone was thoroughly engaged and excited about their creations.  This was a great opportunity for children to mingle across grade levels and share in the spirit of giving. 

Several weeks ago we finished filling our kindness bucket.   Friday we spent some extra time outside as an acknowledgement of all that bucket filling.  Without enough snow for sledding, many children became engrossed in imaginative play.  Some were baby dragons following tracks across the field on hands and knees, hunting perhaps.  Others discovered a crop of "wheat" and were harvesting it to make bread.  This inspired someone else to bake a cake and the wheat harvesters happily shared the location of their crop and began supplying other ingredients as well, including sugar, vanilla beans, and chocolate chips.   Lots of really good things happen developmentally through imaginative play, but mostly it's just fun!

While the bucket has officially been filled and the challenge is complete, children still tell me about how others have filled their buckets throughout the day.   It is incredibly gratifying for me when someone says "Ms. Beattie..." and then follows by telling me how someone just filled their bucket.  It is easy to focus on reporting only negative acts, and I hope through this challenge we have established a habit of noticing and acknowledging the many positive interactions we have on a daily basis.  From sharing a lego, to helping zip a jacket, or giving a compliment, kind acts are happening all the time.

Each day after lunch we have Writer's Workshop, which is a much anticipated time of day for many children.  It is often hard for children to stop when our time is up and if we skip writing I get a lot of disappointed feedback. 

As we have learned the letters and their associated sounds, children are becoming more and more independent as writers.   Writing skills naturally grow at varying rates, so we have talked about the importance of not comparing ourselves to classmates, but working hard wherever we are and continuing to show growth.  Some  children are still dependent on adults to help them generate sounds in words while others can write entire sentences independently (with phonetic spelling). 

Right now our biggest focus during writing time is getting words on paper. Children typically choose what to write about; many write about events in their lives, but other common topics include imaginative stories, books about animals, or books with a repeating or growing pattern, which give practice writing specific sight words (e.g., I see a flower, I see a flower and a sun).  In addition to writing words we also talk about starting at the top left of the page and working our way down and leaving spaces between words, which makes a piece of writing much easier to read.

I have compared writing to climbing a mountain, an analogy children seem to like.  As long as one takes even the tiniest steps they will continue to move up the mountain.   Children are very eager to share their finished work with the class and they are so excited when I can read what they have written without any help (I have lots of practice with this - don't worry if you can't quite read your child's writing yet!)