Sakiko and Dulce’s Class Notes

October has been a month of exploration, discovery, and getting to know one another more deeply. Through our read-alouds, conversations, and creative explorations, we have been thinking about who we are, how we see the world, and the many ways we express ourselves.

Some of our October read-alouds included The Color of Us, Circles All Around Us, Maybe, Butterfly Migration, Gotta Go, Gotta Go! and I Wish I Were a Butterfly. Each story offered opportunities for conversation, reflection, and new ways of looking at ourselves and the world around us.

One of our most exciting experiences was releasing our monarch butterflies! After watching their transformation, we had the opportunity to tag our monarchs before sending them on their journey south. We are participating in the Monarch Watch program, where each tagged butterfly becomes part of a larger community science project. Their tags are recorded in a tracking database, and we are hopeful that fellow butterfly watchers will report sightings along the way. It will be exciting to follow their journey and see just how far our monarchs travel!

We have also been diving deeply into poetry. Through reading, listening, writing, and sharing, the students have been exploring the power of words and their many layers of meaning. We have been paying attention to individual voices, the feelings behind our words, and the different ways in which we each see and experience the world. Poetry has become a powerful vehicle for self-expression, allowing us to discover a little more about ourselves while learning to appreciate the unique perspectives of our classmates.

As we continue to build our classroom community, we are finding that getting to know one another is an ongoing journey—one filled with curiosity, thoughtful conversations, creativity, and plenty of discoveries along the way.