We started this week with an assembly. It is fantastic to have the chance to gather as a community and see showcases of learning from other classes on our campus. We also enjoy singing together, led by Owen, the music teacher.
Our focus in math has been perimeter, area, and angles. Ask your Temescalians how to find perimeter and area. We introduced a shortcut for finding area of a rectangle is to multiply the length by the width. “That’s like finding the array of the box!” We also introduced how to use a protractor to find how big an angle is. We paired off and looked for right, acute, and obtuse angles in the classroom. Some found examples in letters, the hands of a clock, fraction pieces, and pattern blocks, amongst other places. See if your Temescalian can find examples of these angles at home!
We wrapped up our Patricia Polacco book groups and presented back to the group abut Mrs. Katz and Tush, My ‘Ol Man, The Trees of the Dancing Goats, and The Junkyard Wonders. Themes of friendship, forgiveness, loss, sharing, laughter, and love flowed through each of these stories. We hope that studying our mentor author will give us direction as we begin brainstorming and writing our own family stories.
Our focus in mindfulness this week tied in with Earth Day. We were thinking about a tree and its leaves as the stories we tell ourselves. We incorporated the Zones of Regulation into this work by color coding the thoughts. Some green zone ones would be “onward!”, “I’m good at…”. Blue zone leaves could be “I’m tired” or “I’m sad”. Yellow zone leaves could be like “What if…?” Red zone leaves would be “I’m never going to be good at this.” While all of your emotions and thoughts are important and should be recognized, we emphasized the idea of holding onto the green zone ones. The kids drew the green ones still on the tree while the blue, yellow, and red zone leaves were on the ground in their pictures. It causes us to take pause and appreciate how honest and thoughtful our Temescalians are. Some wanted privacy and others wanted to share theirs with others. After dropping by the BYA this week, some kids added in the extra element of decomposers into their pictures. You can find these drawings in their sketch books in their cubbies. Ask your Temescalian to share with you about their drawings!
Our ongoing partnership with the Berkeley Youth Alternative (BYA) is helping us understand not only about plants, but what is essential to the food web and life in a garden. Our focus with Gardener Lisa was on decomposers. They are essential creatures that help turn dead things into nutrient rich soil that help plants grow and continue the life cycle. To illustrate the necessity for decomposers, we played two versions of freeze tag. The first version, there was “Death” and 3 “decomposers” who couldn’t get tagged by Death and could bring frozen players back into the game. This version allowed for the game to keep going until we called time. The second version involved the same players, 1 Death and 3 decomposers, but this time, the decomposers could get tagged by Death. This version of the game quickly ended as Death picked off the decomposers first. While in real life, decomposers are susceptible to death as all living creatures are, taking decomposers out of the game also take out the ability for life to continue. Thus illustrating the essential role these lowly decomposers play in the circle of life. Gardener Lisa talked about different types of decomposers and Temescalians got a bucketful of compost and did a scavenger hunt of decomposers, looking at a list of possibilities. Many found pill bugs, ants, and spiders. One pair even found a salamander! But we suspect the salamander was a little higher up in the food chain and was actually hunting the decomposers as its prey. It was a gorgeous time outside in the garden by Strawberry Creek Park, and a wonderful way to celebrate Earth Day!
We also celebrated Earth Day by receiving native wildflower seeds from the kindergartners. In a collaboration with Blackberry Creek, they created pamphlets to hand out with the seeds. They explained that they wanted to help the monarch butterflies by giving them food. “If we plant these flowers, they’ll have something to eat and live!”
We borrowed an Ohlone Culture Kit from Coyote Hills regional park and the kids were able to have a closer look at the different tools they Ohlone used, different types of cordage and the plants used to make it, a miniature tule boat model, and acorns in the different stages of processing and preparation to ready it to cook.
Building on our understanding of the Ohlone people and how they lived off of the land, we created our own shelters from natural resources we found in Strawberry Creek Park. We used clay as a base to simulate the earth that you’d actually be building on in real life, and kids used the materials they gathered according to their planning sheet. Julianne guided us through this creative process, and the Temescalians’ creativity was amazing! There were so many different types of structures.
We also started coil basket making. Using sisal rope as a base, we wove raffia around the rope to secure and create the shape of the basket. As they wove, some kids remarked, “Can you imagine having to make the cordage for all of this? This must have taken a long time!” “This is hard! But I guess the Ohlone had a long time to be good at this. And this is what they learned instead of school.”
A few other happenings this week:
– Ben, a past teacher who has since moved to the Philadelphia area, came back to visit!
– A few Temescalian volunteers went to share with the 7th graders how their actions in the middle school breezeway affect them. (The 7th graders are trying to cause change around an issue that affects the TBS community.)
– We finally got to our weekly reflections! Please look for them in your child’s folder this weekend!
– Family Fridays
– We celebrated Lisa’s birthday!
Upcoming events:
April
30 – Spring Sing (Kids arrive at school by 6pm! The show starts at 6:30pm!) Temescalians wear blue or black
May
16 – Wrap Party (for adults! Buy tickets online!)
22 – New Family Mixer and Community Potluck (contact Araxi if you’d like to help!)
