We are officially through our first full week of school, and the boys (and I) had a great week!
This week we continued to build our understanding of the concept of diversity. They boys are becoming quite skilled at identifying different aspects of diversity and have a greater appreciation for their own individuality. One of our highlights this week was an activity that involved the boys drawing a picture of a garden. On one side of the page, they were instructed to draw a garden/nature scene with only 1 black crayon. Although some of the drawings were quite lovely, something just didn't seem right. "Why are we only using black?" Conor asked. "Just trust me, we're going somewhere with this...you'll see," I replied. Once we finished our "black" drawings, I then asked the boys to draw that same scene on the other half of the page, but this time with all the colours in their crayon box. Soon, the pictures turned into colourful, vibrant scenes. Marcus noted, "In my grey picture there is just a tree house. In my colour picture the tree is an apple tree with leaves and apples." "Hmmm, funny how the colour seems to help us imagine more," I responded. Once we finished the drawings and debriefed the boys completed their own reflections, including "diversity is like a box of crayons because..." Here are some of their responses:
The world would look black and it would be plain and uninteresting (Ben F.)
The world is filled with colours (Sahaj)
It's coloured. It's beautiful (Sebastian)
Everyone is different (Michael)
Each color is like what makes us who we are (Olivier)

Today we moved on to begin making the connection between diversity and communities. The boys generated a great list of places, services and people that are part of our community. Some of the boys even wanted to keep the list running right into centers time! Their little minds were just whirling with connections that they wanted to share. They even noted that a community has to respect diversity because lots of different people live in a community.

In art, we had fun making aliens out of our names with Mrs. Buchanan. We were very creative thinkers adding symmetrical shapes and colour layers to our aliens.

In math we learned the difference between even and odd numbers, worked on our skip counting, and started our math journals. Our math journals will be used to record responses to mental math as well as to track growth in understanding of math concepts.

We also spent some time talking about what it means to be at thinker. The boys surprised me with the creativity of their responses - they recognized that they are even thinkers when they are playing tag and have to come up with a strategy on the spot to avoid the tagger. I thought that was quite a connection, and shows that they see that thinking is not just a skill for school, but for life in general!

Learning is such an adventure, and as our week draws to a close I am pleased to say that we had a week full of great adventures in 2 Dynamite!