The Learning Bin

For nearly all my life my schedule has revolved around a school year. In the past I looked upon New Year's Day as a fresh beginning. But as time passed I realized I was much more committed to a fresh start happening in August. Now I call them my "new school year resolutions" and find myself accomplishing goals that would likely fizzle out if I began them in January. In August of 2014 I made the resolution to live debt free. This is a huge goal for a normal couple in our early 30s, complete with some credit card debt and a sizable chunk of student loans. I began by making a monthly breakdown that included the amount I would need to pay for each debt point to pay off the total plus interest amount in 12 months. As late summer moved into early fall I found that I was able to pay twice as much as I had estimated. I credit our frugal lifestyle for this boon. We're also working really hard to get into good shape so our soda and Doritos money is going toward the pay off. Bri...

When I take the "long" way to work I pass by this impenetrable wall of green leaves. Each leaf is between 12 inches and 3 feet long. Everyday I wonder, what might live behind this wall of green? I'm planning on using this image as a writing prompt for part of our jungle unit.

We had a little trouble with transposed Rs this time around, but the rainbow theme spawned two days of rainbows, unicorns, and dragons in the painting and art areas. Imagination is a wonderful thing!

Explaining a quilt to a group of kids who live in an equatorial jungle is trickier than it seems. I brought in a quilt from my house left over from chilly Michigan and Ontario winters and the kiddos snuggled up in it for Tommy dePaola's The Quilt Story. They especially liked the soft boarder, so we added a ruffled on to our collages.

In my house pizza is a touchy subject. The very smell of it makes my hubs want to vomit, but I have a deep and comforting love of this food. As a result of this split in opinions, I save my pizza love for end of the year classroom parties and clearly it finds its way into art projects. So for the love of pizza, I present our P Pizza collages, topping may vary.

The kiddos in my class are used to seeing octopus tentacles being grilled on skewers in the market stalls, but making a crafty one wasn't too much of a stretch! I'm happy to report that as a class that data for letter recognition and phonetic sounds has jumped up greatly since I launched the letter collages.

We had a couple of dad's come in to do an art project with the kiddos and the children could not stop talking about how fun it was to have "guys" in the class. In honor of dad's everywhere today's collage is N Neckties!

Where I live there are four kinds of monkeys that we see nearly everyday. On the way to school or in the afternoons it is quite normal to see troupes of either shorter long tail macaques. And if we are especially lucky we catch sight of a gibbon or langur high in the branches of a tree. When I first chatted with the class about monkeys they were most excited about the short tail macaques who tend to be the larger monkeys who are not skittish around people. And thus was born the M Monkey, or M Macaque. The children are quick to say that the monkeys LOVE garbage can messes.

Our L Ladybugs spawned a fascination in insects. Now everyday at recess the kiddos search for moths, beetles, and giant cockroaches to put in our magnifiers and observe. So far I haven't been too creeped out by all of our classroom squiggley wiggley guests.

Let's go fly a kite! It was a beautiful sunny day to make our K Kites collage. The kids enjoyed their kites, and we told stories for our journals about times that we have each flown kites before.

This year I have been using Starfall.com as a supplement to my teaching. The Gingerbread Boy is a teaching tool that comes with the curriculum, and boy do the kiddos love him! I used the idea of a jump roping Gingy for the J collage. This was a great teaching moment about letter/sound similarities and differences. And of course, Gingy approves!