Community Street

Every Friday we set aside an hour of our time to revisit our work with communities and relationship. We continue to work with our studio teacher, Anna, on our community sculpture, so half of the class goes to visit with her. The children are creating symbols of strong communities out of clay.

The rest of the children remain in class. We were using the time to develop board games that helped reinforce ideas about good communities. The games are finished. I was thinking about how to fill the time in class in a meaningful way.

One Friday morning after playing math games, children were discussing who had won. In a spontaneous way we ended up singing a funny little song about how it is OK to have a winner and that it is just not a big deal. One idea lead to another and we eventually ended up with our own show called Community Street, which is patterned after Sesame Street with small little episodes meant to be instructive to the viewer.



Community Street: No Big Deal from Andrea Pierotti on Vimeo.


I decided that I wanted the show to address real problems that the children face on a daily basis. We now have a  jar in which we collect difficult social situations from the children's lives. The second week we had a scenario written. "My sister and I sometimes fight over what to play." We used that as our focus for our skit about compromise.


Community Street: Compromise from Andrea Pierotti on Vimeo.

I'm interested in what other topics will emerge. How will processing these topics in this way assist them in dealing with future social encounters?

Weather Station

Mr. Jones came and helped us set up an official class C weather station (at least I think that's what he said). We will be measuring the precipitation at Sabot for an entire year. Our measurements will be passed along to meteorologists to help them with their work.

 This is a snowboard. It allows us to catch and measure the snowfall off of the ground so that the temperature of the ground does not interfere with our data. Mr. Jones thinks there are only three in Richmond. There is the official one at the airport, one at his house and now one here on campus. We want our data to be as accurate as possible. We will measure the depth, but will also capture a cylindrical sample and melt it to measure the water content of the snow. We sure hope is snows SOON!!

 This rain gauge will help us measure the rain fall.

We will also measure the temperature twice a day every day at the same times.

This is exactly the kind of authentic work I would love to always have for my students but don't always know where to find. Luckily he found us!