A Day in the Sunshine

We were very busy this morning, working on our art project (we are preparing for the Big Art Show to be hung outside the auditorium).

We also took care of much of our day-to-day business, like journaling, building, puzzling and taking care of the guinea pigs.

We took scraps out to the composter...

...and discovered a front loader moving the mountain of mulch. We stopped to cheer them on, and then used our muscles to flip the composter over a few times.

Back inside, we cleaned up, had snack and gathered for Morning Meeting. After our Moment of Silence, we sang Make New Friends in our best monster voices (ask your tiny person to sing it for you, it's pretty impressive).

Danielle read us a new book called Stuck in the Mud,

it received almost unanimous thumbs ups from our panel of highly particular critics.

Next, Carol and Danielle brought the Peace Table over and demonstrated how friends could use it. First, they had a pretend disagreement, and then they went to the Peace Table to work out the problem. They took turns describing the problem, and then got help from the class figuring out how to solve it. Many friends thought that Carol was being "unfriendish" to Danielle, and wanted her to say something nice. Then, they came up with a variety of ways that they could play together.

We will be using the Peace Table a great deal in the coming months, to encourage friends to put their feelings and ideas into words, and to negotiate solutions. As teachers, we will not give them scripts or particular words to say (i.e. we will not tell one friend that they need to apologize to another). Rather, we will encourage them to find the words and actions that make sense to them. History shows that these solutions are often unexpected but, as long as both parties agree, we simply go with it. The Peace Table gives friends a space and a means to work through what are new social challenges, in a format that validates the importance of their feelings and relationships. Initially, one of the teachers will help facilitate these conversations, until they are ready to manage them on their own. We will keep you posted, as the use of the Peace Table evolves.

Also this morning, an Upper School student named Erika came in to work with a few Catbirds. She is studying Piaget's Theory of Development and looking particularly at what is called Conservation. This is a child's ability to understand that, although an object's appearance may change, it still stays the same in terms of quantity. For example, if you pour liquid from a tall thin container into a short fat container, it is still the same amount of liquid.  Erika tried some of these exercises with some of the Catbirds, and they could not be fooled!

We also had our first real Inside Outside Day, where friends could choose activities to do in the room or outside. After very little time, everyone was outside (and who could blame them?)

We had paper airplane making on the stage, as friends tested a variety of models and launching techniques, to see which flew farthest, fastest and which ones did flips or boomeranged. Friends from other classes got interested and joined us.

We also had a running experiment in the pond, that involved constructing different ways to move water around and predicting how changes would effect the flow. Before we knew it, it was lunchtime! We had lots to talk about as we ate.