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2021-2022 School Year Updates
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Mrs. Svaty started the year by reading The Pigeon Has to Go to School and What Do You Do With a Chance?.
Additionally, the Kindergarten and PreKindergarten classes listened to and sang “The Wheels on the Bus” and then read the book adaptation, Pete the Cat: The Wheels on the Bus.
Students identified and explained the nine differences between the song and the book. They did a great job. This was the beginning of our lessons on how songs can inspire books or books/poems can inspire songs. Our state song, “Home on the Range”, was initially a poem but was later adapted into the song we know today.
It has been a wonderful time working in the library with the Topeka Collegiate students! Grades 3, 4, and 5 have spent the last several weeks discussing long-form non-fiction as we have read a New Yorker article, "The Really Big One", about the Cascadian fault line in the Pacific Northwest. At times, non-fiction can seem too factual to be interesting to young minds, but this article is captivating and encompasses many of the topics the students are learning in geography, science, and language arts. Writing long-form, non-fiction that keeps the reader's attention is a skill and one that Topeka Collegiate works hard to develop in our students. The 5th graders last week had some questions about the work I do with Harvesters, the Community Food Network. So, we set aside our reading for the day, and we discussed food insecurity and the role of food networks and food banks in our community. It was an excellent conversation and incorporated many of the traits Topeka Collegiate strives to teach our students.
Our Pre-K students have been celebrating the time of year each week in the library! We had some fun Halloween stories about counting witches and pumpkins, reading Where is My Mummy?. We had a great conversation about the benefit of the differences we all have after reading Spookly. And we took a Halloween ABCs book and practiced our ABCs in Spanish as we described all the Halloween things associated with each letter of the alphabet.
The Kindergarten through 2nd graders spent time reading some more advanced works related to fall and Halloween. We discussed elements of the stories that could be fact or fiction and then encouraged the students to create additional elements to the story.
We spent a couple of weeks this fall learning about the woman who is said to have brought trees and foliage to San Diego in the late 1800s. Additionally, we discussed Jane Goodall after reading, Me... Jane. Lastly, we read The Tree Lady: The True Story of How One Tree-Loving Woman Changed a City Forever. This book is delightful, and I was lucky to find it at the Breckenridge public library this summer. It has become a family favorite.
