This Week in Alpha
What’s this?!
This Week in Alpha…
Thanks Everybody for holding down the fort while I bounced between Austin and Lincoln, Nebraska last week!
Part of building community involves teamwork. Through teamwork, we build trust. Our table team challenges right now help us explore how we work together, collaborating, negotiating, and compromising. We’re all really good at knowing what we personally want, but it gets very sticky for us to figure out how we can work together towards a common purpose. So the first exercise for us Alphas is to practice keeping our eyes on the purpose – this week, it involved moving items to specific places.
Guiding close-eyed partners requires trust and trustworthiness…
Dylan’s turn to close his eyes…
Crab-walk delivery! It’s a two-fer: we move books on our bellies to another “crab,” while at the same time building up gross motor skills that actually improve our HANDWRITING!
Our next challenge as table teams was to build a neighborhood of houses in a very short period of time! We needed doors, windows, chimneys, roofs, and rooms! So each table made enough of one supply for the entire class: Red Table made all the square houses, Blue Table made all the roofs, and Cherries in the Snow made all the rectangles for doors and windows. By the end of the period, we had a little time left to read a great book about a neighborhood where the houses were identical!
Sasha’s working at top-speed!
We may never know how a seagull carrying a bucket of paint got into our classroom overnight…
But we were delighted to be able to use all manner of fun materials to turn our houses into the house of our dreams…Just like Mr. Plumbean did with HIS orange splot!
The next challenge for our table teams was to think about a Peep Village. We talked about our Crestview neighborhood, and remembered the photos of what this area looked like before the houses were built – “It was just grass, and dirt, and no streets or stoplights!” So the table teams were asked to try to come to some agreement about where their village would settle – we agreed that it would be good to have a source of water – but would it be from a river? Would it be from a lake? They had to try to figure out the best source of water for their table.
The teams tried very hard to divide magic stones so everyone could create something, but it got pretty loud and frustrating when it came to reaching a consensus!
We took a moment to reflect on our feelings and remembered that when we feel frustrated, annoyed, and irritated, it could be a sign that our brain is confused and GROWING! Brains grow when they aren’t sure what to do – they start reaching for answers. So far, Alphas have practiced expressing frustration but we are learning to breathe, and ask questions. We are practicing to reflect on the facts- like we needed to find one source of water and we couldn’t do that, but we DID decide the blue stones are the water, and the white stones are the snow, and the clear stones are the ice/fresh clean water.
We all felt a lot of relief and success when we got supplies to make Peep houses out of different kinds of blocks. We did a great job sharing the materials and having more autonomy to build our own homes.
Conflict doesn’t feel good, but it is a reality. Learning how to work through it with civility is a worthy endeavor – well worth practicing!
In Language Arts…
We read, we wrote, we spelled!
Sharing our Travel Journals…
Using our brains and our knowledge of sounds to make rhyming words, replacing initial sounds, even NONSENSE words – or especially nonsense words! Way to spell and write ALPHAS!
Alphas LOVE and good story – and LOVE listening to Ms. Ruth!
Stories have characters, settings, and authors have a purpose: to share ideas, teach, entertain – sometimes all of those things in one book!
In Math…
We learned about patterns that “grow” this week. When we count, that’s a type of growing pattern because we are quantifying more or less by a certain amount. We looked at fractals in nature. Fractals are patterns of something shaped a certain way that repeat by getting larger or smaller in an organized way. They might not be exactly the same shape or size, but they might start large like the trunk of a tree, and split off into a few branches, that split off into a few more smaller branches, and repeat over and over again growing taller as its branches grow thinner and smaller. We also worked on our Season Cycle project – using a “fractal tree” we learned to make.
Our Season Cycle Project…cut-circle, fold into taco…fold again into a piece of pizza…
Summer & Fall… and Fractal Trees!