Welcome to a new “unschool” year at Zoma Creative!
We have started the year with so many adventures and creative projects, new friends, and even a new “cozy room” next to the classroom. Students are busy designing our Naturescape, which is going to be just one more incredible addition to our creative space!
Here’s what we’ve already been up to this year:
Monday/Thursday (am): Students continued our Early Humans PBL unit with bows and arrows this week, and animal balloons. We have some true hunters on our hands! We also looked at fire safety, and the tools that set mankind on a path of creativity.
Our favourite activity was looking at stone tools and thinking about how complicated they really were to make. Pretty impressive for the first stone tools!
Last week we looked at the diaspora of humans throughout the world, and how cultures began to form around the places they settled. We looked at incredible artifacts and started to recreate our own, including various habitat structures and clothing.
Monday (pm): We chose our first books for silent reading and played Naughty Monkey to get our literacy brains activated. In math, we will have various stations set up to explore, at our own pace, some of the basic numeracy skills.
Tuesday: In Spotlight Theatre, we jumped right into our first story drama, which explored “generosity” and “negotiation.” We first looked at Japanese Fable “the Old Man and the Statues.” Students put on a variety of hats and got into the character of that hat. Next we tried to put the scrambled story back in order, and finally, we acted our parts of the story and tried to imagine how the characters would have reacted to terrible news. We were all surprised to discover that the Old Woman was very kind, knowing that good acts were rewarded, which they were!
We also explored win-win, win-lose and lose-lose through a variety of skits, including Marble Madness, Tug-o-war, Human-Tug-o-war/ Donkey Dilemma and Police Dilemma. Our conclusion: win-win is possible with a little give from both sides.
Wednesday: We have explored two French themes already: In the Classroom (Dans la Salle De Classe) and In the Jungle (Dans la Jungle), with some amazing illustriousness for our french cartoons.
In Art Class we worked on the colour wheel, our first canvas work, as well as designing our own aprons.
In Cooking last week, we made a surprisingly delicious Watermelon Salad with bocconcini, mint, basil and almonds. This week we used potatoes and squash from the garden to make a layered “Bay Potatoes” dish (but used rosemary instead of bay leaves), which smelled and tasted amazing!
On Thursday (pm) we built our new Math Gnomes and read Chapter One of the new adventure. The four gnomes met two new character: the Fraction Twins. We learned the languages for the gnomes, as well as the surprising places they show up in our own lives!
We learned a new reading skill: Follow My Cue, where students highlight 5-10 difficult words in the reading before we begin. Students then write the word on cue cards and pass them to me. As we read the text, I read the cue card words aloud. It was great to see how much we already knew, and how many new words we learned in just one reading!
On Friday, this week, we headed out on our first Nature Adventure, to Mill Bay Nature Park. We loved running through all the trails, checking out the rock art and fairy houses. We explored the tide and even brought home some rocks to paint ourselves.
In the afternoon, during Exploration Centers, students chose from:
- Store
- Wood work and
- Microscope slides
We ended up combining wood work with the store as students created their own toys to sell!
