There are lots of great things that go on everyday at Baker-Butler. Here's just a quick snapshot of what is happening around 8:30am on a Tuesday morning.
First, there was a fantastic interdisciplinary lesson going on with two 5th grade classrooms and our PE teacher, who was participating in their Morning Meeting. These two classes are partnering for our Bear Tracks unit this year, which is connecting physical activity, geography, Virginia Studies, and math. The students are wearing pedometers and they're tracking their steps as they walk the Commonwealth of Virginia through the lens of the history they're learning in class. As an example, if they start at the settlement of Jamestown, they then keep track of their steps until they reach Williamsburg or Richmond, which they're also learning about in class.You can learn more about this project and track their steps at their wesbite,
Bear Tracks.
One of our 3rd grade classes has a praying mantis that they found, and they're using their questions to learn more about this insect and its characteristics. Here's a picture of some of their questions below. You also see the word YET, which is a focus of our school as we help students understand that they have the potential to change their success by their thinking and their effort. We encourage students not to say "I'm not good at this (Math, Reading, etc)" but rather "I'm not good at this YET," which implies that they can get better. This is called adapting a growth mindset and it has been a focus of our school the past two years.
Our Music, Art, and 3rd grade homeroom classes (especially Science) are working on an interdisciplinary unit on Autumn. Here are 3rd graders learning how to play a song about autumn that they will be performing at the end of the unit.
In Art, our 3rd grade students are making leaf prints on their shirts to wear during the performance. They paint leaves and then roll them onto the shirts.
Here's another example of a Morning Meeting in a 2nd grade classroom. In this activity students are greeting each other by name by passing a ball to each other until everyone has had a turn. They will time themselves and keep repeating the pattern (student A to B, B to C, etc) until they beat their record. This was a great way for one of our new students who started today to learn his new friends' names quickly.
Lastly, some of our 5th grade Reading students were working together in the lobby on a word study sort. They were exploring the differences and similarities of synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and homographs.
We hope that this quick glance into just 30 minutes across the school gives you a snapshot of what goes on every day at Baker-Butler.
