Room 10 Blog: November 2,2019

Dear Families,

WELCOME TO DECEMBER!!

We began our day in circle today. As part of our morning routine we talk about what helps us to be ready to learn and work together. Today a parent joined our circle. We listened to her play the pan flute music and then a student in our class accompanied her with beautiful drum sounds. The students shared that the music was beautiful and they felt, clam, relaxed, happy, love, and peaceful. We spoke about using a dry smudge - an indigenous way of knowing - as a way for students to feel that it will help to stay calm, focused and relaxed. These are very important feelings we need to have while we are in a learning environment like at school.

Sometimes we feel other emotions like frustrated, mad, sad, annoyed. These feelings are ok. We can help us get to our calm, focused and relaxed feelings by visiting the space in our classroom such as the peace corner.

We always start a smudge by smudging our hands, so we have clean hands to smudge the rest of ourselves. From this point, you can smudge however you feel like in that moment. Here are some ideas:

After smudging our hands, we can smudge:

- Around our head to clear our mind and keep our thoughts kind about others

- Around our ears, so we hear kind things about others

- Around our eyes, to make sure we see kind things in others

- Around our mouth, to keep our words kind when we speak to others

Anyone can smudge, as long as we stay respectful to the medicine from Mother Earth.

Thank you to our parent volunteer who came in today and gifted us with the beautiful music abalone shell, and message.

We read the story, What Does It Mean to Be Kind - Ask me what it was about.

We also…

Looked at writing rubrics for when we write about our weekends. We talked about assessing our own work to see where we are at and where we will go next.