Hawks Fall into Kindness (ages 7-9)

by Kristin Finch

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One of the cornerstones of elementary education is social emotional learning. It is constant work that follows us through our whole lives. Children often hear the phrase, “Be Kind” but do they really know what that means or how to best accomplish that goal? The Hawks have been working on exactly what it means to be kind. We role played different actions and discussed if it was kind, helpful, or could be unkind. We keep an eye out for any acts of kindness we spot during the day and bring them up during our class meetings. We remind ourselves daily how we can best contribute to the community and include others. We discuss how kindness is something that needs practice, the more you do it, the easier it becomes and the more it spreads to others. 

Another way we work on our emotional selves, is to use mindfulness and quiet moments. Calming our body down and listening to ourselves and the world around us help us know our feelings, stop and listen to others and have better control. The Hawks have been working up the time we can sit in silence. We started off with about 30 seconds being our longest time, and we have worked up to over 5 minutes. We all sit together in a circle, find a comfortable seat for our body and start to relax. We can close our eyes or watch the sand go through our hourglass shaped timers. We have been charting out time on a bar graph to bring in math and a little competition to keep us going. The Hawks have said things like, “I feel so calm” and “Let's see if we can make it to 10!” We are going to keep going and see if we can have a full 10 minutes of silence and then observe if that helps us throughout our day.

One of the best benefits of our school is the size and therefore the ability to teach each child exactly where they are. The Hawks mix together with the Eagles and then separate into smaller groups for both reading and math. Each group can focus on different work that challenges and engages the students. Some of the Hawks worked on measurement, where we started by measuring our jumps. Each student jumped as far as they could. We measured that length with measurements, using our feet, popsicle sticks, and yard sticks. We found the importance of standard measurement and brought that into measuring the area of things in our room and then computed the area of various geometric shapes. 

Hawgolwood is the heart of the school and the Hawks agree unanimously that it is their favorite part of the day. Hawgolwood is the wooded area next to the school where the children go after lunch time to play, build, swing and participate in imaginative play. Hawgolwood was named for the Hawks, Owls and Eagles classrooms and it is a place for all the kids to be together as a community. It is a place where we work together to find the best way to build a structure, solve problems and work out conflicts, and a place where we work on kindness and inclusion as well as physics and states of matter. You can see kids building a fort made out of sticks, ‘selling’ food made of grass and mud at the local restaurant or performing acts at the circus. 

Red Fox Community School picks a theme for the start of the year, and this year it is environmental innovation. The Hawks have been fascinated, reading books about inventions through the years and discussing what makes something an invention. We are furthering the conversation by talking about how inventions help people, how things are continuing to be invented and what things we need to invent to help our world. Each Hawk is researching a

specific invention and looking to the answers of these questions. 

Arthur

Once upon a time I had two fish. Karen has a fish named AJ. It lives in her office. I feed him one pellet. It is not a lot but it is for him. 

Fox

Today in Hawgolwood, me, Fritz, Emerson and Leif, were raking the Hawgolwood path to get it ready for the Halloween parade. Then we used wagon and the wheelbarrow to haul the leaves to our junk yard in Hawgolwood. The junk yard is a big area in the middle of Hawgolwood where we dump the leaves to keep them out of the paths. 

Grant

Our new art teacher is Zena. In art we made monster mad libs. We folded pieces of paper in four sections. All of us drew heads, then we passed the papers around. Then we drew more body parts. When we unfolded the paper the monsters were funny. Zena is also the afterschool teacher and I love doing art with her in afterschool. 

Reed

I like to play Banana Tag in the Field. It is very fun because everyone is ‘it’ and gets to tag other people. When you get tagged you either sit down or put your arms over your head. When the person that tagged you gets out, you get back up. I like to tag almost everyone and sometimes I get out. 

Ryder

On Monday we baked apple muffins. We picked the apples from Mad Tom’s orchard. We cut up the apples and mixed with cinnamon, sugar and flour. They were really delicious. I really liked them.