Orange Band: Rock, Week 4

It's starting to happen: we are beginning to get into a rhythm. Which is great! We've established our weekly routine, have learned many of our protocols, and games, are getting deeper into our Rock exploration, and are regularly adding responsibilities and competencies. Self-sufficiency, here we come!During the second week of school, we brainstormed together a list of jobs we thought kiddos could do in our bandspace. We really covered our bases, and narrowed our list down to seven jobs, so that everyone could have a job each week. This week, everyone got a job! We now have a weekly morning message reader, agenda reader, art supply monitor, pencil sharpener, library monitor, whiteboard wiper and superhero (read: substitute). Our classroom stayed so neat and tidy all week!We've also been working hard on self-portraits and collages to go in a honeycomb-shaped corkboard that hangs on the wall adjacent to our button rug. And this week we made colorful nametags, flexibly chose our spots in the honeycomb, and posted our portraits for all to see. This place really feels like home now.We also went on another field trip! To Lands End! I heard that the labyrinth near Mile Rock Beach had recently been rebuilt (out of rocks, duh!), and thought it would be a great chance for us to spend the whole day outside. I was right!We took the bus, learned a bit about the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, walked the Coastal Trail, checked out the view of the cliffs and the coastal mountains, talked about the tectonics of the Bay Area, missed our turnoff, ate some lunch, backtracked to the labyrinth, searched for the Minotaur, and practiced resilience by hurrying back to catch our bus back to school. Wowee! And, how could I forget--we also started making a timeline for the last 100 million years of the history of the earth. Using sheets of paper printed with 5,000 dots on each sheet, and imagining that each dot represents 100 years, or about one human lifetime, we are creating a detailed timeline showing the history of the earth, a bit past the K-T Boundary. The kiddos are really excited about many aspects of this project: researching eras, periods and epochs of the history of the earth, taping together the sheets of paper to create columns of dots, and creating detailed illustrations to show important events or features from different periods in history. I can't wait to see it come it together, and the process is fun too!