Grades Classes Aug 14 - 18

Hi Garden Families, 

The Grades Class had a terrific first week at The Garden School! We have a wonderful group of students and Ms. Kathee and I are excited for this school year!!  

This week, we played name games and other fun games during morning circle as we got to see our old friends and get to know our new friends. We enjoyed working in the garden and playing games with Mr. Lee, Handwork with Ms. Lindsey, the upper grade students had math class with Ms. Roxanne and we spent time exploring and splashing in the creek. 

During our first block we enjoyed our story and form drawing, music class with Ms. Kathee, and playing math games together!  

We will continue with more of the same work and play next week. We will also begin Spanish class! :) 

"Work while you work
And play while you play. 
This is the way
To be happy each day. " 

Warmly, 

Ms. Melissa and Ms. Kathee

Grades Classes May 8 - 12

Dear Garden Families,

The children enjoyed practicing and then preforming at the Mother’s Day Tea this past week.  They put in a lot of hours into practice, crafting and preparing snacks for all to enjoy and had a fun time doing it!  We also had fun playing math games with Ms. Roxanne and in class, and all especially enjoyed boat making from natural materials with Mr. Lee.

As we wrap up our last week at school, we will enjoy our last visits to the creek, our times with our various expansion teachers, and being with each other! 😊

Warmly,

Ms. Melissa

Grades Classes May 1 - 5

Dear Garden Families,

We had a great week together!  The children are enjoying practicing for the Mother's Day play.  They are learning their parts and learning how to move their puppets.  They also have been spending time crafting and cooking as they make gifts to give.  We had a fun last week in Japanese, which wraps up our foreign language experiences for this school year.  Games class was changed (due to the wet weather) to a fun fact-filled nature walk with Mr. Lee.  The children created drawings and writings all about our discoveries.

Next week will bring us to more crafting and play practice.  We hope to see you at the Mother's Day Tea on Friday morning!

Warmly,

Ms. Melissa

Grades 1/2 April 24 - 28

Dear Garden Families,

We have had a busy week!  We have been studying and drawing native plants as well as writing summaries and narratives based on Native American stories we have been reading.  Gardening has been productive as we moved a lot of mulch to try and combat the ever-present kudzu.  We ended the week, saying good-bye to Ms. Angela, with an adventurous creek walk!

This coming week the upper grades children will practice mathematics with Ms. Roxanne while the lower grades garden with Mr. Michael.  All children will continue with our nature studies and practice for our Mother’s Day tea puppet play, make crafts and enjoy the rest of our days together for class.

Warmly,

Ms. Melissa 

Grades 1/2 April 17 - 21

Hi Garden Families, 

We had a busy week at school! We read the stories The Four Winds, The Length of Winter and Kluskap Finds the Summer and copied or wrote summaries independently based on each story as well as drawing pictures and making yarn flowers. We have been reading about insects and have learned some fascinating facts about dragonflies! The creek holds its usual enchantments for the children as well. :) 


Starting this week we will have Gardening class Mondays and Wednesdays starting at 9:10AM through the end of the school year. Please be sure your child has used the bathroom when he/she arrives and brings water shoes, snack and a full water bottle to the playground in the morning. 

Warmly, 
Ms. Melissa

Click here to read Ms. Angela's goodbye message. 

 

Grades 1/2 April 10 - 14

Hi Garden Families,

The children enjoyed coming back after spring break and getting back into the fun of outside play!  Please make certain your child has appropriate footwear for the creek.  An extra pair of socks and shoes is also very helpful for most students.  We are also getting wet once again, so extra clothes and a bag for wet clothes is needed.

We are enjoying Native American stories that give us opportunity to learn more about the natural world around us.  It was also a lot of fun, and very interesting, learning more about each other’s names and our families. 

I hope you all had a chance to enjoy our Springtide festivities this past Saturday!

Warmly,

Ms. Melissa

P.S. The “critter” in the bucket in the photo is an American Eel that lives in our creek! 😊

Grades 1/2 March 27 - 31

Hi Garden Families,

It was a beautiful spring week at The Garden School!  We enjoyed a lot of outside time at the creek.  The children are ready to dive back into full-on creek play (literally), so please be sure your child comes with extra clothes, shoes and a bag to keep wet gear contained in backpacks.  You may choose to send your child to school with bug spray if desired as we will be spending most our day outside in our forest classroom following break. 😊

This past week we finished our math block with the red gnome named Divide.  The children quickly picked up on the concept of dividing amounts into equal groups and we drew many connections between division and the other three mathematical operations we have studied.

The children had lots of fun during pentatonic flute classes this week with Mr. Ben.  He had them jumping and moving to the notes, told funny stories, and had the children enjoying their daily lessons.   In Handwork, they are continue knitting projects with good success.  Our garden is taking off and the chicken coop is nearing completion.  The children have had lots of fun practicing yoga with Ms. Nina on Wednesdays as well.

When we return to school following break, we will dive into our last Language block combined with Nature Studies while sharing Native American legends. 

Have a lovely and safe break!

Warmly,

Ms. Melissa

Grades 1/2 March 20 - 24

Hi Garden Families,

We had a great week with the yellow gnome named Times.  We spent our mornings working with gems to figure out how multiplication works.  The children really enjoyed taking a group of gems and seeing how many ways they could be grouped for faster counting (multiplication).  We also practice form drawing with circles which takes some practice and patience.  We are back to playing in and around the creek this week with the nicer weather.  We saw a Yellow Belly water snake (our best guess😊), snails, minnows, and many macroinvertebrates. 

The children all helped to make and tasted mango lassies on the last Thursday of Hindi class.  Next week we will begin learning American Sign Language.  They also had so much fun playing Camel Tag and Blindman’s Bluff in Games class.  For Handwork, the children wet felted around plastic eggs, an activity offered at our Springtide festival on April 15th, as well as continued working on their knitting projects.  Our garden is starting to show its signed of springs as the seeds the children planted are now seedlings and being replanted into our garden beds!  The watering crew worked very hard bringing water from the pond to our new plants too.

Spring has sprung!  Please check your child’s backpack and be sure that their extra clothes are in place and updated for our spring weather.  They will be getting wet once again and a change of clothes is necessary as well as extra shoes for inside (or boots for outside).  Jacket are still needed in the early mornings as is full rain gear (pants too please).  Every child has had their water bottles (yay!) which becomes even more necessary as it warms up.  Thank you all!

Have a lovely week,

Ms. Melissa

Semester 2, Week 8

Hi Garden Families,

We had a chilly, but enjoyable week in class.  We met Minus, the blue gnome, and practiced subtraction using gems on our place value boards.  The children built numbers and then practiced the concept of “borrowing” from the tens bags of gems as we subtracted numbers.  We will continue practicing both addition and subtraction as we move into meeting another gnome next week whose name is Times.

The children also spent time with Ms. Angela this week and worked on the weather wall near the front desk.  They learned about the various types of clouds and wind speeds.  We also had a good time celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with some stories, treats and we learned to tie a Celtic heart knot as well.  

It was wonderful talking with each of you for parent conferences these past two weeks as well.  Thank you!

Have a lovely (and much warmer) week!

Warmly,

Ms. Melissa 

Semester 2, Week 7

Hello Garden Families, 

We had a busy and exciting week at school.  We worked daily on the concept of place value (ones, tens, hundreds) to build numbers with gems. The children enjoyed the challenge. We then took the numbers we built and added more gems to them to practice addition with single and double digits.  We also enjoyed wet-on-wet painting the green gnome who we found out is now named ""Plus" by King Equals.  Next week we will move into the concept of subtraction.  

Of course, (way) more exciting than math was watching the first chick hatch out of its egg earlier this week. The children have enjoyed watching and holding the newly hatched chicks each day since then. 

Thank you all who came for parent conferences and I am looking forward to those scheduled for next week. 

Next week is looking much colder than this week. Please continue to send your child in layers and with rain gear in their bags. :) 

Have a lovely week,

Ms. Melissa 

Semester 2, Week 6

We had a busy week at The Garden this week! 

We started our final math block, meeting five gnomes and an ancient tree named Old Dismas, who will teach us more about the secret of numbers and mathematical operations.  We revisited the Roman Numerals I – XII and learned larger Roman Numerals such as L for 50 and C for 100.  We also began building numbers up to 50 with gems forward and backward, using the concept of place value based on the rainbow.  Our fun way of remembering rainbow order is with the phrase “Regal old yellow gnomes buy itchy vests”.  We played a bean bag toss game to help us remember the order of colors.  For Language this week, we re-visited nouns and verbs, and introduced adjectives, including three special adjectives we call “articles” which are “a”, “an” and “the”.  We created funny sentences describing nouns in which we used many adjectives!

Next week we will continue our gnome adventures while building numbers forward and back to make the concept of place value concrete.  We will work on addition equations as well.

Parent conferences will be happening next week as well!  I look forward to seeing and talking with you then.

 

Warmly,

Ms. Melissa 

Semester 2, Week 5

We wrapped up our alphabet block sharing stories of Saints and Hero's this week.  The children increased their amount of writing in both cursive and print.  We also talked about sentence structure and practiced verbally creating lots of sentences (some quite sillyJ) with nouns and both action and helping verbs. 

We will begin our new block following winter break, meeting some friendly gnomes while we are learning/revisiting the four mathematical operations and place value. During this block children build larger numbers and use those numbers to add, subtract, multiply and divide as we follow a story of adventure with the gnomes. 

We said good-bye to Senora Lina this past week and are looking forward to meeting Ms. Indira for our next block featuring Hindi.  During Games class with Mr. Lee, the children loved play Octopus Tag (a game invented by Alys).  The students and Mr. Ben began construction of clocks and practiced pentatonic flute, we planted more seeds and destroyed more (and more and more) kudzu with Mr. Michael along with bringing water from the pond and adding to our compost pile.  During handwork, the children continued to work on knitting skills, with some children starting to follow specific knitting patterns.

I hope you all have a restful and fun-filled break this coming week!

Warmly,

Ms. Melissa

Semester 2, Week 4

Happy Valentine's, 

We had a fun and busy week at school.

We continued hearing stories of Saints and Hero's while we added summaries to each picture highlighting various aspects of the stories.  Our stories varied from "Francis and Clare" to "Hiawatha, Bringer of Peace".  Summaries vary from a single sentence in print to two or more in cursive depending on the student.  The children also modeled various characters from the stories in clay or beeswax and as well as painted scenes using the wet-on-wet painting technique.  We continued practicing our skip counting of threes using sticks, balls or beanbags to create the skip patterns and drew the threes multiplication fact flower.  We had a special bonus class with Ms. Roxanne working on multiplication tables and measurement too!

This week the children played basketball inside and capture the flag outside with Mr. Lee, finished assembling the new desks for the second forest classroom and practicing pentatonic flute with Mr. Ben as well as working on the many gardening projects we have happening, such as seed planting, with Mr. Michael.  We all enjoyed our week in Spanish with Senora Lina.  Senora Lina will continue teaching Spanish until break, after which we will start our next language block.

A Valentine’s Day postis on our Facebook group outlining our Valentine’s Day fun.  Please let me know if you need more information. 

The weather continues to keep us on our toes with donning and shedding our layers.  Please keep on sending them with your child! J Thank you!

Warmly,
Ms. Melissa

The Many Treasures of Mixed-Age Learning

With several students and teachers out last week with symptoms of the flu, our elementary students all crowded together for main lesson. While combining ages poses some pedagogical challenges, there is so much richness and connection that comes from having a chance to see how those older and younger than you learn. It was wonderful!

The practice of grouping students into grades based on their age during the school year is quite new in education. It developed after the Industrial Revolution as a way to ease the administrative burdens of educating large groups of students in rapidly expanding cities. 

Although there are pedagogically sound reasons for such a division, they don't tell the whole story of education, and much is lost when we make assumptions that all children are developmentally ready for the same materials and experiences at the same time.

At The Garden School, small classes and caring, highly-trained teachers allow us to understand and meet the needs of all our students regardless of their age, and to feel confident that each of them is developing according to their best potential.