Saplings Core - Sept 8-10

Monday

To start off our first foundational week, we learned about the tipi pole teaching of discipline. This teaching encourages students to look toward their elders (older students, teachers, parents, and grandparents) who are acting out of love, for clues and direction about how to learn to be their best.

In class, we reviewed our Magic Curriculum areas and requirements for badge work. We also worked on our daily practices (math games, cursive writing, and calendar), then students chose a novel from our classroom series to read throughout the year, one chapter per school day. We will begin sharing about what we read next week. All first chapters were read aloud today while students followed along. We are currently reading The Capture from the Guardian's of G'Hoole series (first book of 16), and The Magician's Nephew from the Chronicles of Narnia series (7 books).

After lunch, we used our foraged elderberries from last week to make our first batch of cough syrup. Saplings took home a sample to try with their families. This first batch is more of an immune booster than a cough syrup. We will continue creating until all of our berries are used up. The shelf life of Elderberry Syrup is 2 months in the fridge. Enjoy!

We experimented with watercolour painting on fabric canvas. We reviewed and experimented with background washes and chose a grid stencil to paint over in another colour after the wash dried.

We learned that watercolour is too thing for stencils and we will try something new tomorrow. Students discovered the typewriters and began exploring this method of typing as well. Students also created a map of our learning space. We reviewed the directions, identifying where North is from inside the building and creating the map outline together on the board, then students explored and added magic curriculum areas and checked out the materials in our space.

Tuesday

After calendar today we began adding more to our morning routine. After our morning snack and calendar, students were given a word problem to work through independently. Both had a tricky start and were able to discover their answers. After their math question, they wrote about a time in their life when they experienced discipline in their personal life. This writing will be edited and students will type their responses tomorrow on the typewriters. We continued with silent reading of chapter 2 of the books students are reading, then finished up our morning with a game of Yahtzee to assess how quickly counting up is happening.

After lunch, students explore a new resource of an assortment of raw crystals. A legend was provided in the package, however the crystals in the package did not match the legend, so everyone got to research with our crystal resources to identify all the new crystals and learn a bit about each. Afterward, each student chose a few crystals they would like to add to the grids that we started making yesterday.

We went back to our paintings with metallic paint markers to trace our grid stencils. This worked out much better. The crystals chosen today will be added to the painted grids, and glued to a board so we can begin experimenting with energy fields next week.

We ended our afternoon with music circle, as tomorrow afternoon is our drum making day, in preparation for our Equinox Celebration and Drum Birthing next Wednesday.

Wednesday

Wednesday morning we read our first story in circle to support student understanding of discipline. We read "Bear For Breakfast" by Robert Munsch. Insights were deep and surprising. We found discipline or lack of discipline for nearly event character in the story.

After calendar, we settled into a split routine where I was providing support and strategy in the Zen Room while Corbin worked through cursive practice, typed up his response around his learning about Discipline, and received a short review lesson of writing mechanics, and spelling supports.

Reminder From The Zen Room:

Today marked the first day our Zen room needed to be utilized for wellness. It is always available with charged mp3 players, meditations, emotional regulation supports and more. As a rule in our school, we honour our feelings. As we work to create a safe enough space and relationships to allow ourselves to surrender to our feelings at school and be open about them, please know that we support students taking wellness days at home if and when they are needed, retreating to the Zen room WHENEVER needed, even if that is the first stop of the day. Over the next few weeks we will be working through our Zen practices and learning about our energy. This will support more awareness around feelings, and more may come up, which provides more opportunity for regulation.

For the remainder of the morning, Corbin continued working through his crystal grid and crystal research in preparation for our first major project and experiment of the year. Once all our research and writing was done, Corbin and I played Cribbage Wars until lunch time.

After lunch it was drum making time!

Mila, Ivy, Bodhi and our Supply Teacher and student of our education program, Pam, all created their very first drums after exploring the ethically harvested Deer skin, hand made Ash hoops, and the meanings behind the circle and drum.

Today was a no picture day for me as it was FULL of engagement. To check out pictures of drum making, please read the Sprout post for this week when it is live <3

Create a beautiful weekend and stay grounded!