This Week at Immanuel Lutheran School
On Wednesday, after Chapel, I was invited in to the second grade classroom. The children are really enjoying their current lesson about Night Creatures and were very excited to share it with me. When I first arrived, Jenna, Sarah, Zachary and Ronan were holding up the “Big Charts of Learning”. I will let the children explain what they are.
Jenna: My chart is what we know about bats. This is what we already knew about bats before we started to learn.
Sarah: Mine is a big list of all the questions we had about bats.
Zachary and Ronan: We have two pages of facts we learned about bats.
Miss Murphy then asked the class what the most “WOW” fact we learned? The children all agreed that it was the flying fox. All together (unplanned) they recited that the flying fox has a wing span of 6 feet, which is taller than Mr. Palkewick!
Another favorite is the bridge in Texas. Apparently, in Austin, there is a bridge that “a whole bunch of bats come out from every night. It is so many bats it looks like smoke!” Miss Murphy did verify that it is an estimated 1.5 million bats.
Finally, I asked each child what their favorite new fact was:
Ella: The bumblebee bat! It’s as (the whole class chimes in) small as a jelly bean!
Jenna: They are the only flying mammals!
Sammy: I like the bat that makes a tent from leaves to protect itself.
Sarah: A baby bat is called a pup.
Ronan: When pups are born they can’t fly, they can’t see and they have no fur.
Sammy jumped in again to tell us that all bats have 4 fingers and a thumb, just like humans. Ronan started talking about the reading he did at home, which turned into the question of do bats live in Antarctica. That sent the children off on a tangent of all the different ways they can find the answer.
Although I did learn many new facts about bats that morning, I also witnessed firsthand the benefits of “looping” (Miss Murphy moved to 2nd grade with her students). Usually, November is the month that the classroom finally settles into a pattern. These children did that back in September. The months of transitioning were instead months of active learning, which has the 2nd graders about 2 months ahead of schedule with their curriculum. The introduction of the new looping program truly is already showing benefits.
Spend some time with the school; it's a wonderful place to be!
This Week at Immanuel Lutheran School
On Wednesday, after Chapel, I was invited in to the second grade classroom. The children are really enjoying their current lesson about Night Creatures and were very excited to share it with me. When I first arrived, Jenna, Sarah, Zachary and Ronan were holding up the “Big Charts of Learning”. I will let the children explain what they are.
Jenna: My chart is what we know about bats. This is what we already knew about bats before we started to learn.
Sarah: Mine is a big list of all the questions we had about bats.
Zachary and Ronan: We have two pages of facts we learned about bats.
Miss Murphy then asked the class what the most “WOW” fact we learned? The children all agreed that it was the flying fox. All together (unplanned) they recited that the flying fox has a wing span of 6 feet, which is taller than Mr. Palkewick!
Another favorite is the bridge in Texas. Apparently, in Austin, there is a bridge that “a whole bunch of bats come out from every night. It is so many bats it looks like smoke!” Miss Murphy did verify that it is an estimated 1.5 million bats.
Finally, I asked each child what their favorite new fact was:
Ella: The bumblebee bat! It’s as (the whole class chimes in) small as a jelly bean!
Jenna: They are the only flying mammals!
Sammy: I like the bat that makes a tent from leaves to protect itself.
Sarah: A baby bat is called a pup.
Ronan: When pups are born they can’t fly, they can’t see and they have no fur.
Sammy jumped in again to tell us that all bats have 4 fingers and a thumb, just like humans. Ronan started talking about the reading he did at home, which turned into the question of do bats live in Antarctica. That sent the children off on a tangent of all the different ways they can find the answer.
Although I did learn many new facts about bats that morning, I also witnessed firsthand the benefits of “looping” (Miss Murphy moved to 2nd grade with her students). Usually, November is the month that the classroom finally settles into a pattern. These children did that back in September. The months of transitioning were instead months of active learning, which has the 2nd graders about 2 months ahead of schedule with their curriculum. The introduction of the new looping program truly is already showing benefits.
Spend some time with the school; it's a wonderful place to be!