Week Four at Conerstone

On Monday Cornerstone hosted a guest speaker. Her presentation was about women in history.  The woman, who happened to be an actress, dressed up as Annie Sullivan and did most of her presentation with an accent. She discussed many prominent women in history such as Florence Nightingale, Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman, Amelia Airhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Helen Keller. It was interesting to see the manner in which their life stories and contributions were presented to young children.  While the students seemed half interested in the presentation, she made great efforts to make them an active part of her talk.

On Wednesday, the students worked on a descriptive writing project.  Each student was to draw a creature and then write a detailed description of it. They were then to read their description to a partner, from which the partner was to draw his or her interpretation of the creature. The accuracy of the second partner determined how well the author described his or her creature using details.  I thought this was a fun and effective way of conveying to the students what exactly is meant by details and describing words.  One student even said after realizing his partner’s take on his creature looked nothing like his, “I guess I didn’t give good enough details!”

Thursday was a fun day!  We held preliminary testing of their secret projects they had been creating for science. Vicki and I took groups into the hall to see who could get their device to go the furthest.  They then had the opportunity to make changes to their device based on what they saw happen.  Some of their ideas are extremely creative. I love watching their minds turn as they try to figure out how to make their object go further than everyone else’s.
Overall, it was a great week, even though we didn’t have school on Tuesday due to the snow.  I got to see a lot of imagination at play in the creature project as well as in the secret science project.  It’s refreshing to see such creativity.  The reading groups finished with their work, so Miss Dillon and Mrs. McCoy’s group switched with one another.  It’s good to observe how teachers interact in such a situation.  It’s great to split students into smaller groups so that they get full attention from their teachers .