At the beginning of this week, we celebrated a birthday with a learner that was shadowing with us for the day. Their joy and curiosity will be a wonderful addition to our community.
The mornings this week were filled with the pleasant hum of productivity. Students continued to work on their SMART Goals, taking each of their goals and refining them to be more specific and beginning to think about how they will measure their progress. Next week we will reflect on how each 30-minute increment during the work cycle and core skills was spent.
In PE this week, students worked to refine their Yoga sun salutations and their mindfulness exercises. Learning to do nothing but pay attention to your breath and being aware of only one sense (touch, taste, hear, etc.) at a time proved to be a difficult task for all! Surprisingly they all said they enjoyed the exercise (Maybe it was having to focus only on a chocolate kiss?).
MadLibs also had a revival this week. Nothing like a book of MadLibs to get the class giggling over these goofy, grammar-filled stories!
It’s been lovely in the afternoons and much time has been spent outdoors caring for the ant colony, planting “seeds,” and playing games that the students make up.
Code.org continues to get more challenging, but it’s definitely a challenge they are eager to push through. The Lego Mindstorm set is almost complete and next week we introduce more robots and another Lego robot set. The “unplugged” activity was a big hit with some: they turned one person in each team into a “robot.” Then, the robot followed the algorithm to create a specific cup tower design.
