These are the things we could write books about:

• Koalas!
• Double-digit subtraction
• Monarch butterflies
• "Said" is dead (using descriptive words)
• Riddles
• Paper flowers
• Homophones
• Creativity
• Finger knitting
• Prayer flags
• Rube Goldberg machines
• Polywogs
• Group art
• Singing

• Mother's Day gifts
• Measurement
• Selu -- Life on a '30s farm
• Reading
• Friendship
• Making board games
• Area
• The Monster Project

• Tadpoles
• Character Studies
• Descriptive words
• Zoos
• Baking cookies
• Dancing

• Mindfulness
• Animal adaptation
• Times tables
• Drawing
• Painting
• Letters to Santa
• Dissecting a Monarch chrysalis
• Self regulation
• Harriet Tubman
• U.S. maps

• Meditation
• Animal classification
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• U.S states
• April the giraffe
• Writing
• World maps
• Poetry
• Addition
• Creativity labs
• Goal setting
• Raising Monarch butterflies
• Working together
• Writing time
• Reading Aloud
• Dragon in the Sock Drawer
• Multiplication
• Frogs

• Perimeter
• Dioramas
• Vertibrates
• Experts
• Valentines
• Habitats
• Double-digit addition with carrying
• Christmas presents
• Planting flowers
• Invertibrates
• Speaking out
• Handwriting
• Family heritage
• Self portraits
• Special person's tea parties
• Field trips

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This year we learned...

• A mountain weighs the same as a teaspoon of a neutron star
• There is ice on Mars
• To be calm
• Cheese has protein
• Seeds fall from flowers
• My teachers are nice
• About space

• Baking soda and vinegar react
• You can be kind even if you're rough
• Plants help the earth
• Autumn is called Fall
• How to spell
• When my friends' birthdays are
• To read

• To add
• About different planets
• To spell
• BookShares
• KidScience

• To get clues from pictures, beginning sounds, and letter chunks as we read
• Sight words
• To put finger spaces between words
• To try using lowercase letters
• Capital letters go at the beginning of sentences and important words
• Patterns - color, number, shapes
• Estimating
• Haunted House Project
• Space Shuttle Project

• Problem solving
• Counting by 2s, 5s, 10s
• Finding the "middle point" of numbers
• Combining numbers
• Breaking apart numbers
• Shapes - 2D and 3D
• Measurement
• Surveys and graphs
• Gardening Project

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What we learned this year, in our own words...

• How to take care of friends
• How to take care of our classroom
• How to take care of Haven

• What Haven eats
• Not touching Haven’s head
• Be with friends
• Eating, playing, dancing
• How to hug friends

• How to be patient
• How to be a dinosaur
• How to be a scientist
• Paleontologist!
• Playing Jurassic World

• We find animals that we dig we want to keep them, but we have to let them go
• Jumping on your knees
• How to put on my shoes
• Drawing different stuff

• How to open yogurt with scissors
• How to give journals to friends
• How to draw dinosaurs
• Playing on the playground

• Climbing trees
• And smelling flowers
• How to let go of the Monkey Bars
• How to Jump from the Monkey Bars
• Putting books away

• I can hang upside down and climb all the way to the top of the Monkey bars
• I went down every step of the ladder because I’m big now
• How to sit at circle
• Criss Cross Applesauce
• To write the names of family
• Magnet tiles stick together

• Not to swing wood really fast
• It’s good to be mindful and calm and peace
• To be calm and quiet
• Not to eat so fast

• Yoga
• I learned about flowers and birds
• Learning the colors of the rainbow
• Rainbow Song
• Changing different colors

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Written by BMS Early Learning and Forest Kindergarten teacher, Jenni Heartway.

One of the exciting things about being a teacher is that by pursuing our own interests, we are actually being reflective practitioners.  In other words, we are practicing what we preach.   

Encouraging our students to follow their own passions would be hypocritical if we, as lifelong learners, didn't follow our own interests.

Recently, Tammie (BMS Early Childhood co-teacher) and I had the opportunity to hear one of our favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, speak at an event celebrating the 10th anniversary of her book Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.  Both of us adore being in the woods and making friends with creatures and plants there, and we were pleased to learn that we share a favorite author whose writing is infused with interactions with the natural world.

Creating a culture of readers and writers is an essential part of all the classrooms at Blue Mountain School. We do this in casual conversation and through more formal ways like BookShare (an oral book presentation) in my Early Learning class and the Writing Center in Tammie's Early Childhood class. You can see it during Writer's Workshop in the Middle Elementary class, and it was very evident on "Poem in your Pocket Day" when the Upper Elementary students shared poetry with their younger friends.

The culture of reading at BMS is also very obvious in staff interactions. We pass books to each other after school and often share snippets of essays and poems via email. Teachers are writing and publishing books and articles and drafting presentations to share with wider circles. "Living the writerly life," as Lucy Calkins says, is a part of our everyday and will hopefully become part of our students' everyday, as well.

I enjoyed telling our students about my experience meeting Barbara Kingsolver during my turn at BookShare.They were interested to hear about how star struck Tammie and I were when we met our favorite author. It is important for our students to not just hear us encouraging reading at school but also to hear about reading taking place outside of school and about adults getting so much pleasure from wonderful books.

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