Earthkeeper Jobs and Pledge

We have taken on new jobs this week at school! These jobs are our 'Earthkeeper Jobs' and we are working very hard to help make the world a better place. We have gardeners, composters, reducers, recyclers, green cleaners, and pledge keepers. We will be switching jobs every two days until vacation so the students have the opportunity to work at each job.

We have also taken an Earthkeeper Pledge to keep the Earth clean. This pledge follows the form of the Pledge of Allegiance and we read it each and every morning during Morning Meeting. Yesterday, the students engaged in an active discussion about what the pledge meant and how excited they were to keep this pledge promise!

Stay Tuned! We are making paper tomorrow during Hands-on-Nature and we are making birdfeeders out of recycled materials during the afternoon!

Ask your student how they are helping to reduce and reuse this week!

Our First Day!

Today we kicked off our unit on change! We talked about ways that we can change the world and be an Earthkeeper! The students had so many amazing ideas! I shared with them that Florida doesn't recycle all the products that they could, and the students were outraged! HAHA! They thought of this wonderful idea of teaching students in Florida about recycling! We wrote a letter to students at my aunt's school in Florida giving explaining what recycling is and giving examples of what can be recycled. They also want to create a play and posters to send to those students to teach them about recycling! So I may be requesting costumes of any kind within the next few days to prepare for our play!

We also collected out snack scraps, containers, and wrappers and sorted them into compost, recyclable, and trash piles. The students realized just how much we throw away! Some even took their containers home with them to reuse another time!

During our discussion, the students shared that they were going to be Earthkeepers by collecting trash outside in order to help the planet. I offered students a treat if they come in with either a parent note or telling me that they collected trash at home.

Ask your student what they learned about recycling and composting today!

Houses for Froggy!

Today we did our last skill builder before my solo weeks start! the students were assigned the groups that they will be working in for the next few weeks! They did an amazing job! Their assignment was to build a waterproof house for our friend Froggy to live in! The students came up with different abilities that their friends and group members were good at. They worked well communicating their ideas and solving their problems! Great Work!

'Alligator River' and 'If I Were Stranded...'

We have been busy bees here in the classroom with group work! Since my last post, we have done two more skill builders! The skills of your students have continued to amaze us! Their insights are very grown-up and they are getting better and better working together.


Last week we read a terrible story about a boy named Gregory and his friends. Each of the characters were bad in their own way! The students were given the task of deciding which students behaved the worst and rank them from best to worst. We came together as a group to compare our results and discuss both our results and our teamwork abilities.

Today we had another skill builder, which was AMAZING! The students have been kidnapped and stranded on a desert island with limited supplies! they were given materials to create a signal on the beach for a plane flying overhead. The students were so creative with their signals. They came up with everything from spelling words to using sea glass to reflect the sun's light and make a light to attract the plane. Others made runways for the plane to land, while others made arrows to point out their location.

Puzzle Skill Builder

For the past few weeks we have been working on building our group work skills. We have planned a trip to the moon and a camping trip. We had given the students a list of items that they could bring with them but they were only able to choose four. The students had to work together to decide which items they were going to bring with them. During these skill builders, the students have worked on strategies of good group work. Some of these include, listening to each others ideas, letting everyone have a turn, voting to make decisions, and everyone makes a contribution.

Today, we approached these skill builders a bit differently. We assigned roles to each of the students in the group in order for them to get acclimated to the jobs that they will have during the larger group work unit. The groups were then asked to work together to build a puzzle, using only the pieces, not the top. The students did an AMAZING job! They worked so well together and had a blast working in these groups. We had amazing discussions about their great group work strategies.

Next week, we will be working more on group work. We will focus more on the jobs that we created this week. These skill builders are preparation for a larger rotation of group work that the students will do during my solo weeks of teaching. i have no doubt that the students will do an amazing job because they have already done so well!

Eric Carle Paper

After going to the Flynn theater to see a puppet show on three of Eric Carle's books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Little Could, and The Mixed Up Chameleon) we were inspired to create our own Eric Carle paper. We used a variety of materials, including toothbrushes, marble rolling, straw blowing, watercolors, tempra paints, and dot paints. We had lots of fun yesterday afternoon creating our own paper, which will create beuatiful pictures from next week!

Math: Measuring with Money

Yesterday we got to measure our feet with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters! Mrs. M painted our feet and we got to make footprints on paper! During math, we got to use different money to see how long our feet were! Then we got to see how expensive our feet were by calculating how many cents our feet were long! It was lots of fun!

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog page! This will keep you updated on lessons that I teach, work that your students are doing, and announcements that I'd like to share with you all! I hope to practice my parent communication skills through this blog. Here again is my e-mail if you want to contact me about anything. jefisher@cssu.org

Stay tuned for more!