Hill/Box 2012-2013 School Year

This year brought about several changes for the Hill/Box Cluster.  Probably the biggest change (and one that I am so thankful for!) is that we are a growing group!  This year, as of the first day of school, we have 26 precious 5-7 year olds.  So since our bunch keeps growing we were blessed to have the opportunity to use both classrooms in the downstairs part of our building.  The 9-12 year olds that have been our next door neighbors for the past several years have moved across the street (I cannot tell them thank you enough for giving up their room!!!!) and so we now have both rooms.  During the summer Margaret and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the best thing for the students would be for this school year.....did we want to stay as one class?.....did we want to totally separate?  Since we had such a large number I was hired full time (my dream come true!!!)....so we had a lot of options!

 What we decided (and I think it is the best!) is that we would still be one class, but we would divide the kids up at times.  Margaret is teaching science, journal writing, and life skills and I'm teaching math, handwriting and spelling and then we both teach reading.  Think of it as when you were in high school and you had a homeroom, but then had other teachers the rest of the day.  Both of us get to teach all the students (which we both wanted) and we still get to be one class.  Since The Capitol School is opened from 7:30-5:30 Monday-Thursday and 7:30-2:30 on Friday we have worked out a schedule to where we alternate days that we have to arrive at 7:30......basically which ever one of us gets to school at 7:30 leaves at 3:30 and whichever one comes at 8:30 or 9:30 (depending on the day) stays until 5:30.  The two main groups we have the children divided into this year are the "moons" and "stars" (we are covering the solar system later on in the year).  The moons eat lunch in Margaret's room and go to swimming with her......and the stars eat lunch with me in my room and go to swimming with me.  We tried to not have the rooms called "Mrs. Hill's room" and "Ms. Box's room" because we wanted everyone to understand that we were all one class, but before we even started school we realized that just wouldn't work......not only did the rest of the faculty refer to the rooms as "Margaret's room" and "Hannah's room", but Margaret and I did as well.  So we're one class, but we have Mrs. Hill's room and Ms. Box's room!

Since both of us are at school for the majority of the day I feel as if we are able to do so much more for the children!  I really have loved the first 8 days of school and I can already tell what a wonderful year it is going to be!  I will create a blog later on that deals with our topics for the year in each subject area. Since we have so many students this year our "expert teachers" (Spanish, German, Chinese, art, music, P.E, Swimming) are with our class for a longer period of time each day.  This allows them to have a small group of students at a time and therefore can teach more to the individual than to the group (which is what is most important to us!)

Here are some "after" pictures of what my room looks like......I had taken some before pictures, but then my phone "updated itself" and I have no idea where those pictures went.......I did put them on Instagram, but I'm not really sure how to move pictures from Instagram to this blog so I'm just not going to worry about it!  So here are the "after" pictures:

This is our world rug.....it is where we meet for calendar and any other time we need to all meet together.  I LOVE having all of this open room!

This is our calendar area.  Here we keep track of the weather, seasons, days of the week, schedule and how many days we have been in school.

This is our reading corner.  This year to help keep our books organized I created a sticker system.  For example books about animals all have an orange circle sticker on them.  The bin where animal books go also has an orange sticker on it.  So far this method has worked really well. (Oh and before anyone asks that isn't my guitar......I can't play the guitar to save my life!  Margaret is a wonderful musician and she plays the guitar when we sing songs and during calendar time.)

This is one wall of the room....below the windows are shelves with work on them.

I am standing on the world rug looking at the other half of the room.  This is where we do any work that would require a table.

This is the back door that leads out to the park.  The curtain on the right hides a nice big closet that I use for storage.

This is a close up of the curtains in my room.  I love them so much.  The blue fabric has "hello" written in several different languages.  I love that it not only says hello in the different languages, but it also says what language it is in.  My mom made these curtains for me!

This bench was in the classroom before me.  It was covered in some sort of black material.  I found this laminated fabric at Hancock and then my mom (I couldn't have gotten my room ready without her!) used her staple gun to recover it.  The kids love being able to sit here and read!

Well that was the grand tour of our new room.  It is wonderful and full of space!!!!  I am so fortunate to have such a wonderful space to work!

African Safari

The final summer school class I taught this year was "African Safari".  I was really excited about teaching this class for the first time this year.  Each summer I travel to Tanzania, East Africa so Africa is a place I love very much.  I couldn't wait to share with my students some of the wonderful things about this place that has become such a part of who I am.

Each day we covered a country and an animal found in Africa.  The countries we learned about were; Algeria, Botswana, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, and Madagascar.  The animals we learned about were; lions, cheetahs, cape buffaloes, hippos, giraffes, zebras, monkeys, elephants, and hyenas.  Our local library had some great books about these countries and animals that were on my students' level.



One craft we made was a paper-mache globe.....this was to help the students grasp the concept of where the continent of Africa is in relationship to where North America is.  I got the template for the continents from this website.

The following are pictures of some of the crafts we made during the two weeks:

I got several of these ideas from these great websites:

PBWorks

Home School Creations

Yummy Worm

Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas

All Kids Network

Learn Create Love

DLTK-Kids

No Time for Flash Cards

I also tried to teach the kids some Swahili.  This is the language they speak in Tanzania and Kenya.  The next time I teach this class I really want to do a better job at teaching the kids Swahili.  

Well that is the end of summer school 2012!  It was a busy summer to say the least, but one that I really enjoyed.  I got to meet a lot of great new kids.....teach some things that I don't normally get to teach during the school year......and even step out of my box a little bit and teach preschool!  I had mixed emotions about summer school ending......it had been so much fun, but at the same time it was EXHAUSTING!  I'm pretty sure I was the only teacher that was ready for regular school to start back! We had a two week break between when summer school ended and the fall semester started.....I originally thought I would have those two weeks off, but during the summer I got some great news......I was going to be hired full time at The Capitol School.  The Hill/Box cluster had outgrown our one room and now we were going to be able to occupy two rooms.  So I spent the two week break moving into my new room!  I will create a post later on about my new room and the changes that have come to the Hill/Box cluster this year!

Soaring Through the Solar System

The third summer school class I taught was called "Soaring Through the Solar System".  This class I taught to the 5-7 year old age group in the mornings and then in the afternoons I taught this class to the preschool. These two weeks are pretty much a blur......I taught for 10 hours a day (without a single break)....so I'm pretty proud I survived!  I had never taught preschool before and was pretty intimidated about it at first, but it ended up being a lot of fun.  Teaching preschool is VERY different from teaching my 5-7 year-olds.  Some of my preschool kids were only 2....so even though I was teaching the same subject I still had to pretty much create all new activities.


By this point in the summer my camera was completely dead.....so I don't have any pictures of my kids actually doing the activities.....the pictures that are posted on this blog are ones I found from the different blogs and other websites where I found the ideas to do these crafts.  Sorry I don't have any actual photos of my students doing these, but I'll try to do the best with what I have!


For both classes we started the first day by talking about the sun....then days 2-9 we learned about planet a day....and finally on the last day we learned about astronauts and why Pluto is no longer a planet.



Day 1: The Sun
The first day we began by talking about the sun.  My goal for both classes was to teach them a few facts about the sun (such as it is a star, all the planets rotate around it.....it is pretty big etc.).  For some reason one of my preschool students didn't grasp the concept that the sun isn't a planet....and according to her dad, she is still argues with him when he says the sun isn't a planet!

This is the craft we made when we learned about the sun.  I got the idea from a blog you can check out for yourself here. 

Days 2-9: The Planets

We started with the planet closest to the sun, Mercury, and then continued until we covered all the planets.  To help the kids remember some things about the planets we learned the song "The Family of the Sun".  Each day we would add a new verse until we learned the entire song.  I changed the song a little bit....the song was written when Pluto was still a planet so I changed that.  Here are the lyrics:

Chorus:

The family of the sun,

the family of the sun,

there are eight planets,

in the family of the sun.

Mercury is hot,

and Mercury is small.

Mercury has no air to breathe;

it's just a rocky ball.

Chorus

Venus has thick clouds,

that hide what is below.

The air is foul; the ground is hot.

It rotates very slow.

Chorus

We love the Earth, our home,

its oceans and its trees.

We eat its food, we breathe its air,

so no pollution, please.

Chorus

Mars is very red.

It's also dry and cold.

Some day you might visit Mars,

if you are really bold.

Chorus

Great Jupiter is huge

We've studied it a lot.  

We've found that it has lots of moons

and a big red spot.

Chorus

Saturn has great rings.

We wondered what they were.

Now we know their icy rocks.

Which we saw as a blur.

Chorus

Uranus is big.

Its cold and greenish-blue.

We've found it rotates sideways

and has rings around it too.

Chorus

Neptune's far away.

Its cold and green and blue.

The planet has a lot of clouds

and rings around it to.

Chorus

The song is to the tune of the farmer and then dale and the original version of the song can be found here.  

The day we learned about the Earth we made this little craft.  Our goal for that day was to learn about how the earth travels around the sun and the moon travels around the earth.  I think this activity did a great job of showing that.  I found this activity on Pinterest.....a link to the blog can be found here.

We also made this book to help the students remember the planets in order from the sun.  I got the idea from this website, but I changed ours a bit.

Some other great activities for a unit on the solar system can be found at these websites:

Education.com

Nurturing the Tender Years

Kreative in Kinder

I Heart Crafty Things

Deceptively Educational

TPT

Calling All Authors and Illustrators

The second class of the summer that I taught was called "Calling All Authors and Illustrators".  In this class we learned about some famous authors and illustrators of children's books.  This is always one of my favorite classes because I love literature so much.  It really is a struggle for me each year to fit in all of the great authors and illustrators into just two short weeks.  I'm pretty sure I could spend an entire two weeks on each author/illustrator, but this time we learned about just a few......Dr. Seuss, Patricia Polacco, Jan Brett, Ezra Jack Keats, Shel Silverstein, Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown, Maurice Sendak, Tomie dePaola and Chris Van Allsburg.  Again it was EXTREMELY hard for me to pick only a few authors and illustrators, but there wasn't much I could do about it!  Thankfully my school has the scholastic series of books on DVDs and the kids were able to watch some of the books on DVD during lunch.......this helped us fit in a few extra!

The schedule for the two weeks was that we would cover an author/illustrator each day.....I would begin by showing the students some pictures of the person and giving them some biographical information.  Then we would read a few stories and create some sort of craft.  Thanks to Pinterest I was able to find some really great activities for the kids to do!

This was my bulletin for this class.....it is kind of hard to tell but it says "authors and illustrators" and in the hat is the famous Dr. Seuss quote "Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive that is Youer than You".

Here are a few activities we did when we learned about Dr. Seuss.

When we read One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish we had colored goldfish and did a sorting and graphing activity.

When we read The Cat in The Hat we made these little puppets and also made cute hats out of tissue paper.....these turned out adorable!

Probably my favorite little Dr. Seuss craft we did was our Horton.  We read the book Horton Hears a Who and then we made these little elephants out of toilet paper rolls.  I was really surprised how cute these turned out!!  Note to self or anyone else that is thinking about doing this craft.......it took about 3 times as long as I thought it would take!

When we learned about Jan Brett we read The Mitten and then made our own mittens and filled them with the animals from the story.

We also read The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco.  For this activity we made our own quilts.  I went to Michaels (who just so happened to have all of their scrapbook paper 50% off!!) and got several different types of scrapbook paper.  Then I cut them into two inch squares and had the students glue the squares onto a piece of card stock.

My great-grandmother (who died before I was born) loved to quilt.  I think she quilted more than anyone else I have ever known about.....I mean we're talking a serious quilter here!  Anyway she made enough quilts that I have 5 of hers (she had over 7 great-grandchildren and we all got that many.....not to mention how many our parents and grandparents got!).  These quilts are one of my most valued possessions.....especially now since I have started quilting myself.  I brought one of the quilts she made (this one is actually my cousins...who is my roommate) to show the students how quilts are pieced together.  I was really surprised at how much the kids loved getting to look at this quilt.  They came up to it and touched it so gently.....I even had a few that remarked on how good it smelled!  I was so happy to be able to share something like this with my students!  I think it would have made my grandmother very proud!

The finished project.

When we studied Eric Carle we got to do a lot of cute crafts.  This one was for The Very Lonely Firefly.  I love how this student added his own drawings to the face of the dragonfly!

When we read The Grouchy Ladybug the kids created their own grouchy ladybugs.  I took pictures of the kids faces (I told them to make a mean face.....some of them were hilarious!) and then I cut them out and glued them onto their ladybugs.

This was for when we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

We had several other cute projects, but for some reason my phone and camera started acting up this summer so I lost a lot of the pictures that I took.  

We also talked about the writing process and even made our own class book.  We based our book off Bill Martin Jr.'s Brown Bear Brown Bear......I was so impressed with the students on how they were able to make the story fit together.  Again I wish I had pictures to show of that because it really was great, but oh well....hopefully by the time I teach this class again I will have a new camera!

Wild Wacky Weather

Each summer at The Capitol School we have our "Summer Explorations".  These are two week classes for preschool up through middle school.  These classes are not only open to students of our Capitol School family, but they are also opened to the public.  This is a great way for us to get to know other great kids/families that attend other schools.  Most of the classes I taught were the 5-7 year old kids, but I did get really brave a teach some preschool as well!  This year I taught 4 out of the 5 sessions.  My goal was to create a blog post at the end of each 2 week session, but somewhere in the middle of teaching 10 hours a day, taking 2 grad classes, taking the MAT, completing my graduate portfolio AND getting ready for the upcoming school year...well, that didn't happen.  So here it is, the end of summer (actually the last 2 weeks of summer) and I'm finally sitting down to blog about what we did this summer.


The first summer school class was titled (in case you couldn't guess from the title of this blog post) Wild Wacky Weather.  Side note......when I was little (somewhere between ages 7-11) I was scared TERRIFIED of storms......we're talking having a panic attack anytime I heard thunder.....so due to being completely terrified I became interested obsessed with the weather.....now thankfully as an adult I am no longer terrified and/or obsessed with weather.....although James Spann is still my hero and I'm not sure what I will do if/when he retires!  Ok back to Wild Wacky Weather......again I had these grand ideas of the blog about this class taking a day-by-day look as to what we did over the course of the two weeks, but that didn't happen.  And probably due to the fact that I flew in from Tanzania, East Africa on Saturday.....well actually Sunday about 2AM......and then started teaching at 7:30AM on Monday, I didn't take as many pictures as I wanted because let's face it I was pretty much in a jet-lagged fog the first week!

So with those excuses (which I hate making, but they are true) I am just going to post the few pictures that I did take and explain a few of the activities that we did get to do during our class.




This was the bulletin board that I made for this class.  No it isn't fancy or really cute, but it only took me about an hour to make and time was something I didn't really have much of, so it worked!

I can't remember which day we made "sky parfaits", but it was one of the first few days of class.  I found this really cute pin on Pinterest (how did I ever teach without it?!?!).  And with a lot of things, the picture I saw wasn't exactly what ours turned out to look like.......but the kids loved them (all, but the two that didn't eat jello....who doesn't eat jello?) so that's all that mattered to me!

Pinterest version of what a "sky parfait" should look like.

Our version of a "sky parfait".

We began the class by learning about clouds.  The kids had a wonderful time learning about clouds and I was really surprised with what all they were able to remember!  We learned everything from the names of clouds, how they form, at what altitude you find the different clouds, and which type of cloud produces what type of weather.  

One activity that was a really big hit was when we created our own clouds using shaving cream and glue.  The kids had a blast getting messy and when the mixture dried it made this really neat foamy type substance!  

To help us be able to identify different types of clouds we created these "cloud watchers".  We printed off pictures of clouds we found on the internet (with the name of the cloud written on it).....then we glued that onto a square piece of card-stock....and finally cut out a square in the center.  This allowed the students to have a "viewing hole" that they could hold up to a cloud and then find which cloud on the side it most resembled. 

The kids LOVED doing this!  I believe the first day we observed clouds for about 45 minuets!  I also had several parents tell me that they couldn't go anywhere without their child identifying every single cloud they saw!  Anyone who is a teacher knows how much that warmed my heart!

We also learned about rainbows and how they form.  I didn't have a super creative craft for this, but this really simple one turned out to be pretty.

After studying about rainbows we also started working on a weather book.  I got the idea from this great blog called Kindergarten Rocks.  If you teach younger kids or have younger children I recommend you checking out this blog.  There are always cute activities to do with your little ones.  We changed a few of the pages (in the blog the entire class only makes one book, but I had each student create their own book), but for the most part our book turned out like theirs.

One science experiment we did while learning about rain was this simple one.  Each student got a cup filled with water, then we added shaving cream to the top and finally added some food color drops.  We watched as the food color drops made their way through the shaving cream and down into the water.

Side note.....and probably only you teachers will understand why I loved this moment so much.....as I was walking around passing out the food coloring droppers I had a student say this to me: "Miss Box, I noticed that my food color drops went through my cloud and into the water before Timmy's.....is this because Timmy has more shaving cream in his cup than mine?".  I LOVE it when this happens.  So we got to have this wonderful discussion about why it was taking some drops longer than others AND we even applied that to the actual clouds that we see in the sky!!

 When we learned about thunderstorms we created this really cute craft.  The students loved it because they got to play with the shaving cream/glue mixture again!  I got this idea from this great little blog called S.B Creatively

One of the highlights each time I teach this class is getting to go on a field trip to our local TV station.  Mr. Scott, one of our local meteorologists, does such a wonderful job with the kids.  He gave the kids a tour of the studio, showed them how he predicts the weather, and even let them have a spot on the evening news!  In April of 2011 our town was devastated by an EF4 tornado that ripped through the center of our town.  Each and every person in our city was impacted in some way by this storm.  Since that time many children (and adults) have become very afraid of the weather.  Mr. Scott talked with the children about this and helped them develop their own safety plans and learn what they can do to stay safe during bad weather.

Wild Wacky Weather class with meteorologist Mr. Scott.

There are so many more things we did over the two weeks that I'm sure I have forgotten to write about, but those are just some of the highlights.  It was a great two weeks and I think the kids not only had fun, but I think they learned a lot too!