– Releasing Ladybugs in the OLE –
Cindy Nix-Schafer's Class
April 12, 2007 Cindy's kindergartners and Donnette Durham's fifth-graders release ladybugs in the butterfly garden in Carlson's Outdoor Learning Environment.
– Published Poems –
Meredith McWilliams's Class
Meredith McWilliams's kindergartners completed a poetry publication project that culminated in a special celebration in their classroom on Thursday, March 1, 2007, when they presented their newly published poems to their parents and other invited guests.

Meredith followed a thoughtfully designed process to help her students write and publish their poems. To begin their poetry study, she and her students read and discussed Dee Lillegard's Hello School! A Classroom Full of Poems, which focuses on various classroom artifacts with poems titled "Scissors," "Books," "Clock," and "Paintbrush," for example. After reading Hello School! they visited Carlson's Outdoor Learning Environment (OLE), where they found subjects for their own poems: trees, benches, birds, etc. The kindergartners then returned to their classroom to draft and revise their OLE-inspired poems. After they had all prepared their handwritten drafts, the class went to the computer lab and used KidPix to illustrate their poems. When they printed their KidPix pictures, they left a space at the bottom of the page, where, back in their classroom, they neatly copied their poems.

The following work samples show the remarkable quality of the kindergartners' work:
Trunk
by Austin T.

Spiky woody smooth flaky
Thump them over
Sit on them forever
They have ant hills
Ahh!

 Flower
by Sydney

Red orange
Waiting to grow
A flower blooms
From a tiny seed
Austin M. works in the computer lab to illustrate his poem entitled "One Bird."
At the class's poetry celebration, Isabela reads her poem to her mother, Amy.
Cassie reads her poem to her father, Orlando.
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