Dear Families,
What’s not to like about exploring the world of measurement? Each day the kids pull from a variety of tools – meter sticks, tape measures, rulers, measuring tapes, measuring wheel – and work to size up various objects. The past few days we’ve been working with perimeter. Perimeter is the distance around a non-circular polygon. After measuring the perimeters of their notebooks and tables, the kids worked in partnerships to arrange a set of shapes in order from the smallest perimeter to the largest. To calculate these totals they needed to call upon their knowledge of adding numbers that require regrouping. They did a really nice job and had a lot of fun too. This made me think of one of my earliest graduate courses at USC. The professor had us read and discuss a point/counterpoint essay around the question “Does education need to be fun?” My first inclination is to say “YES!” However, I guess it depends on how you choose to define fun.
We’ve continued work on our research projects. The kids are now taking their information and turning it into a small non-fiction book. There are some features the class agreed should be present in everyone’s book – table of contents, glossary or pronunciation key, subheadings, etc. Each of the kids also chose a few features of non-fiction they wanted to add to this list for themselves (alliteration, italics, etc). Mr. O’Keefe’s class spent some time with us on Tuesday sharing the non-fiction pieces they recently wrote. His kids offered us a few suggestions and we came back encouraged that we were on the right track with our work. We will continue to work on these in the classroom through next Wednesday. At that point if anyone is not finished I’ll ask them to take their book home and bring it back completed on the following Monday.
The kids are bringing home their research cards today. They need to complete their project boards and have them back at school a week from Monday (November 21st). We’ll present them at that time. If anyone thinks they will be finished by next Thursday or Friday I would LOVE to have a handful of kids present early to help lighten the load the following week. I’ll check in with them on Tuesday and Wednesday to see if there are any volunteers.
Ms. Brinson has done a brilliant job of taking charge of our reading workshop over the past week or so. Here is an update from her…
I’ve been eagerly awaiting my full immersion in the classroom, and it’s finally here! It’s been so rewarding to see the kids everyday over the past two weeks and experience the rhythm of “classroom life” day to day.
One of my assignments for the MAT program was a Curriculum Innovation project – enrich the curriculum by incorporating a new structure of learning. Chris and I chose Readers Theater, an activity which helps readers with fluency, to develop a good pace as a reader, and ultimately to make better sense of a story by incorporating different voices for characters and using strategies such as intonation and emphasis for certain words. The students selected scripts, got into groups with two or three other kids, practiced their story together, and will perform in front of the class. Hopefully, you’ve seen the same excitement and enthusiasm that we have. The students seem to enjoy this experience and I know they’ve all grown as readers because of it.
Finally, we enjoyed the opportunity to have grandparents visit us today. We sang them a couple of songs, shared out a few facts from our research, and gathered stories from them. We plan to use these stories as part of a class book of family stories.
Have a great weekend,
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