Orange Band: HUMAN, Week 1!

My friends, we hit the ground running this week: added a reading and writing activity to literacy workshop, mapped our interests sparked by "Human," started playing with patterns in math workshop, checked out ALL OF THE BOOKS at the library, watched a couple of documentaries about humans, apes and the brain, and started detailed and colorful illustrations of our own bodies.During our in-service work last week, an idea that came up in both upper and lower school bands was reading current events. We found an awesome website, Newsela, that has loads of articles available at different reading levels on lots of different topics. So, I decided this was a great chance to add some choice reading and writing to literacy workshop. Each week, each kiddo can choose one article. Then, they'll write a 3-5 sentence response. When the write, they'll think about what the article tells them about humans from around the world, what problem the article is describing, or if the agree or disagree with anything described in the article and why. Already, kiddos have been reading about emojis and linguistics, the zika virus, gravitational waves, farm workers' rights and more! Also, your kiddos have been BEGGING to work on this at home too. I'm waiting for the organization to verify an account for BWX, then I'll be able to set them up with accounts so they can read articles at home.An idea that came out of our Human brainstorm with LOTS of excitement  was to represent our bodies somehow. Now, I have some ideas floating around for expression that I don't want to give away, but we also have a huge roll of butcher paper, so we measured, unrolled, cut and traced. Boom, your body! Then, while the kiddos caught some Zs, I hung their bodies up on a wall. The next morning, they could look at this 'reflection' of themselves. We hadn't gone to the library yet to start digesting lots of biology, and I wanted to see how they would represent their bodies based on their prior knowledge. Let me tell you, these drawings are incredible. Every one is so different, and so beautiful. They are abstract, concrete, figurative, literal, simple, complex. I noticed kiddos feeling their bones, looking in mirrors, and looking more closely at each other. That was a great morning.We also watched this BBC Documentary, narrated by a woman about to have a baby, and (of course!) Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk about her experience having a stroke. So far this arc, I feel I have upped the anty a bit for these kiddos. At the same time, our exploration feels playful. I'm interested in approaching this topic from many different angles, which is so exciting to me--after all, my degree is in 'Interdisciplinary Studies.' I'm really looking forward to more biology, local history, global issues, linguistics, psychology--just to name a few!See you next week humans!