Newsletter: Week Eleven

”Anything that changes your values changes your behavior.”

-George Sheehan (cardiologist, runner, writer)

Dear Families,

This was the quote used to frame our staff conversation yesterday around student behavior and the ways we support our classes into living and working responsibly among their community of classmates. I was thinking of this conversation after last night’s Curriculum Night. For those of you who were here I hope you noticed how attentive and excited to share the kids were. Second and third grades are such a fun time because so much growth happens during these formative years. The kids are changing every week. We’re still quite playful, and rightfully so, but we’re also learning that there’s a place and a time for everything. I really couldn’t be any more proud of this group.

Here’s a rundown of our past week together…

As readers we thought about how a story is supposed to sound. We’re trying to grow beyond word-to-word reading- moving toward a more fluent rhythm. We’ve been paying attention to how punctuation helps guide us through the text. We’ve also been playing around with the idea of creating character voices for the dialogue in our texts. Chase, Ryan, and Chandler read a Frog and Toad story to us on Thursday as if they were performing on an old time radio show. After having practiced the story for a few days, they read to us with strong, confident voices that were very entertaining. We’re all working on similar projects now. My hope is to video each of the groups final performances and post them to the class blog for you to see.

As writers and scientists we have been organizing research notes and then turning them into full sentences. We’ve talked about the need for punctuation as well as capital letters. Many of us are still not all that mindful of these conventions of writing but these types of experiences help to move us all in the right direction.

As mathematicians we’ve been exploring linear measurement. The kids started by measuring items around the room using non-standard units of measure such as: shoes, markers, pencils, hands, etc. The following day they asked a partner to check their measurements. Their results did not match up in most cases. When asked to write about why they thought the data didn’t match their responses were: (1) Sometime people measured too quickly, (2) People used the same unit of measure but it was a different size than their partner’s, and (3) Some people slid their measuring tool across the surface instead of measuring end-to-end. We used their observations and conclusions to develop our own rules for measurement. These included measuring carefully and slowly, using a standard unit of measure, and always measuring end-to-end. We’re now measuring to the nearest half inch and exploring different types of measuring tools (measuring tapes, yard sticks, tape measures, rulers).

I hope that you all enjoyed reading your child’s progress report last week. I meant to send out a message before they came home asking you to excuse any errors that slipped through. Regardless, the information was an accurate retelling of the things I have noticed in the classroom. I love writing these reports because they provide me an opportunity to sit and really process all the information I’ve recorded on each of the kids. Our next reports, in January, will be a checklist-type report that lists each of the curricular areas with the indicators Developing, Achieving, Extending.

We’re going strong on Expert Projects. You can probably expect materials to come home next weekend so the kids can prepare their project boards. We’ll plan to present just before Thanksgiving Break.

Have a great weekend,

Chris