Building tracks

Welcome back from the weekend! The Birch teachers would like to share more about our safe space in our classroom. This newly created space is for students to go to when they are feeling sadness, frustration or any other strong emotion. It is a space for students to calm down and contains several sensory toys, pictures of emotions, a mirror, pillows, books about emotions and cards to help students take deep breaths (we practice deep breathing daily in and outside of the classroom).

The teachers give a student a few minutes in this safe space area to calm down. After a few minutes, a teacher meets the student over in the area to talk about feelings and emotions. We have been finding that the students are responding well to this area!

Today, we read the book, In My Heart by Jo Witek. This book focuses on different kinds of emotions you can feel. After reading the book, a student asked if the heart on the front cover, looks like the heart that is inside people. We researched a picture of a human heart and talked about the differences between a human heart and the heart shape that we draw. Students had a lot of wonderings about the different parts of the human heart.

We later broke up into small groups. Some students built in the collaboratory with Ms. Brittany while others built and played in the classroom. One invitation read, "how many stones can you stack?" It is interesting to watch all of the creative ways to stack the stones. Take a look at their creativeness!

"I'm using the rubber bands to hold the stones together."

"I'm tracing the rock on top of the other rocks."

 Another group of students showed interest in building tracks for balls. Some worked together and others worked independently on creating tracks out of cardboard tubes and flat pieces. They wanted to make the balls go really fast! After building for a while, some friends wanted to draw their track and create a plan on paper.

"This is the track and it goes under the round table over here."

"This is the water slide and it goes really fast!"

Here are some other buildings and creations from today:

"This is the drink cooler."

"This is the candy store. This is the ice cream and this is the candy."

"This is the candy bowl."