A week in Diamond

Each week, collaborators send home a message from the building to their families. They curate photos and stories to illustrate their students’ experiences during the week to give families that insight into the Brightworks life, and we use the blog to illuminate these experiences for the rest of the community. This week, we highlight Emily and the Diamond Band (6-7 year olds).

Diamond has had an amazing week and a half! We've been full of exploration, collaboration, and creativity in every space we inhabit. Each day, we use our minds, hearts, and bodies to become a stronger Diamond Band.

Last week, we practiced how to join games and listen to each other. We made exquisite monsters that allowed us to work together to create some incredible creatures, presented our monsters to each other, and wrote labels describing wings, legs, heads, and more. Our paper-mache masks have grown with collaboration and determination, and we will keep adding onto them!

In science, we met a new friend, Gertie the cornsnake, learned all about her, and used gentle hands and calm voices to make her feel safe. Gertie even snuck through the hole in one of our shoes! We also kept working with clay to build and paint more animals and habitats. When we use new tools, we gain fine motor skills, the ability to make more precise things, and confidence in our abilities.

As mathematicians, we've been working hard! We've practiced understanding when things are equal and not equal and have begun our new unit using rekenreks! Rekenreks (which we've just been discussing as a new math tool that helps us imagine the seats filled on a double decker bus) are an incredible tool that helps students go from needing to count every unit in a group (ie, counting out six counters) to seeing groups of 5s and 10s and breaking up numbers into useful groups (ie. six as 5 + 1). I'm so excited to be using this tool and exploring new ways of thinking about numbers! Once we have a little more practice in our rekenreks we will make another one to bring home to explore with our families.

We have a new poster in our library recording our short vowel staircase. The short vowel staircase is a tool that helps students distinguish between tricky short vowels (pin vs. pen, lug vs. log) by feeling where our lips and jaws are when we make those sounds. We've started working on digraphs and finding ways to read unfamiliar words. We've been practicing phonemic awareness, which means that we can hear every sound within a word individually. Practicing hearing how many sounds are in a word by putting up a finger for each sound helps students get ready to write and read more! You can also practice finding rhymes and making alliterative sentences.

Here's a story that captures Diamond Band for me: Last Monday, we stretched our brains all day in math, in reading, in play and reflection and making paintings nearly as tall as we are. We had ten minutes left after closing circle. It had already been such a big day that we took six minutes to listen to this piece of music and take a rest. Every single Diamond Bander gave everyone else the quiet they needed to relax in their own way, which is an incredible accomplishment for students of any age. I'm so appreciative of every day with them.