Movements in January

As teachers, we were struck by how happy the children were to be back together at school on the first day back from Winter Break.  Starting at the park gave everyone ample time to meet and greet each other.  When we returned to the classrooms, the children began their work with the purposefulness that comes from knowing one’s materials and the way around the room as well as how to be together.  Now comes the time of the school year that I find the most productive.  The fall with all of its exciting holidays is past.  Adjustments to the year are long behind us.  The children know their peers and their teachers; trust between all of us is strong.  This is the time when academic skills are furthered.  

The thematic work that ties our days together now has several sources.   As we respond initially to that fact from the larger world--that we are in a new year with a new numeral,  how do we make meaning out of this number 2012?  How old is the world anyway?  How did we arrive at this particular figure?  These questions ask us to think about so much, both scientifically and culturally.   As we take what might just be a mundane topic we give it personal meaning for each child and find for ourselves that the topic has its own momentum which calls up both cultural and scientific understandings.  We are makiing personal time lines, and coming to understand the place value meaning in the four digit numeral, as we count out two thousand twelve objects, and will delve into what A.D. and B.C. and B.C.E. each refer to.

    During the Winter Solstice Camp we sang an old circle song:  Sally, Go Round the Sun, Sally Go Round the Moon.  We think of this song when a child has a birthday.  We all are going round the sun, and the moon comes along with us.  As we look at the year, we think ahead to when each child will have the next birthday.  We are painting our 2012 birthday cakes and learning our birthdays.  As we do so, we are learning the order of the seasons, the months of the year, and the days of the week.  A variety of picture books that feature the days of the week help our efforts as does singing songs that help us remember the order of both the months and the days.   Since the very word month comes from the word “moon”, we are reading books about the moon.   As we look at what comes before and after and as we memorize sequence, we are involved in reinforcing and furthering all types of intellectual and academic aptitudes and skills. 

     Approaching learning to tell time is a natural aspect of this study.  We will hope for a sunny day so that we can go out on the patio and make rudimentary sundials—all that is needed is a standing-up stick and a piece of chalk and the sun so that we can have a shadow—so that by doing so the children can see how the clock emerged out of the circle that is formed by marking the earth’s movements. 


           A tie-in to this work is our reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznik.  Now widely known, as the book is the inspiration for a current Martin Scorsese film, the parallels to our current study that is furthered in this work are amazing.    The story deals with clocks and how clocks work and with early silent film history, which involved a feature about a rocket landing “in” the moon.   This volume makes a fantastic read for any motivated child who wants to take on a “tome”.  The excitement of the story is matched by graphics that further the text along as equally as the text itself.  A variety of lengths in printed matter on the pages gives the child satisfaction in turning the pages.  There are sophisticated words and ideas and the young reader knows she is being treated as an intellectually capable individual.  One has to really “read” the graphics.  Unique in winning both Newbery and Caldecott Medal acclaim, the book stands by itself.  In my opinion, Scorsese did justice to the book in his adaptation of it;  his sets add color and light to that which Selznik evokes.  The story line does not deviate much.  We will be taking children from the North Room who have read the book to the movie so that they may enjoy its recounting as well as learn to be literate in more than one medium.

The children in the Big Room are listening to Moominland Midwinter, a wonderfully sophisticated and nuanced book by Tove Jansson.  They are listening with rapt attention to this story that is set in Scandinavia where the sun disappears altogether for a time.  I am impressed at their ability to listen to a volume which sometimes escapes the listening ability of a kindergartener.  Their recent winter paintings which are of white and silvery blue are on black paper are inspired by the novel. 

Parents can reinforce our work at school by:  helping your child learn his/her birthday, playing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, showing your child an analog clock and setting it next to a digital, setting both for the same time so that he/she will associate one reading with the other,  reading more Moomintroll books aloud, sending in old clocks or watches to take apart and birthday candles and coins so that we may count out two thousand and twelve pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.  We will continue these themes through January 20th.




Some Dates to Save:

January 13th--Our first of Four Consecutive Friday Forays to The Berg Haus Continental Club at Hyak —we leave school at  8:30, and return by 4:30
   

January 17th--Open House for Prospective Families  7 pm

January 19th—Dr. Chris McCurry, child psychologist, speaks to our families and friends
                about parenting concerns-- 7 pm at the school  Please invite anyone whom
                you think would be interested.