February 10, 2023 · curriculum
Valentine’s Day is next week and while it always feels a little commercial and sometimes a bit exhausting for me (so much red, pink, and glitter everywhere!), it is a fun moment to get us through gray February. Also, it’s an excuse to celebrate kindness, caring for others, your classroom community, and eat chocolate! Every year, my students would bring me dark chocolate as they know from my shares that is what I prefer, and it was always a sweet moment of being truly seen and appreciated. We wrote about Valentine's Day last year, specifically talking about our investigation of the holiday and what our students came up with as well as a few read alouds. One new read aloud that I am very excited about is Your One and Only Heart by Rajani LaRocca, Illustrated by Lauren Paige Conrad (cover photo; from this list ) - always love anything by Dr. Rajani LaRocca and it’s a great STEM connection.
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September 11, 2017 · current events
One of the activities on our (very long) to do list for the first week of school was writing Postcards for Charlottesville through the #DearYoungPerson campaign with our new third graders. On Friday afternoon, we carved out some time and got started. We started with a read aloud of Painting for Peace in Ferguson by Carol Swartout Klein and used the book as an segue into a conversation about using art and images to help people feel better. Next, we asked students if they had heard of Charlottesville and looked at Charlottesville on a map to see how far it was from our school (less than 3 hours). We received a variety of responses to our question, from “I’ve heard of it before” or “my family member works there”, to “there was a violent riot there.” We had two students who knew more details and shared longer explanations about white supremacists, torches, and terrorism. We confirmed
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