Newsletter: Week Fifteen

Dear Families,

We spent this past week working to shore up some leaks in our understanding of place value. Mrs. Simpson introduced a fun dice game, we worked with base-10 blocks, we wrote numbers in both expanded (300+50+7) and word (three hundred fifty-seven) forms, and we stretched ourselves to read numbers all the way into the trillions. We'll continue to do a bit more of this work next week as we learn another game that not only addresses place value but focuses on use of the calculator and mental math as well.

We are reading Stone Fox in our reading workshop. It is a truly wonderful story about a boy who finds that his only hope of saving the family farm and restoring his grandfather's will to live is to win a dogsled race against the unbeatable Stone Fox. The prize money is just exactly what he needs to pay off the back taxes (convenient, I know). Stone Fox has a reason to win as well - he is trying to buy back land taken from his tribe so they can return to their homeland. Stone Fox has never lost and has five strong Samoyeds to pull his sled. Little Willy, the protagonist, has only his old dog, Searchlight. The ending is a terrific surprise no one ever sees coming. Be sure to ask your kids about it this weekend.

Connor shared a news article on Thursday about a family who tried to produce as little trash as they could for a full year. The photo shows them posing with a single mason jar "overflowing" with their year's worth of trash. It was pretty interesting. I half-jokingly said "Hey, maybe we should each carry around a bag for one day and see how much trash each of us produce and then analyze it to see where most of it comes from."

"We could graph it," Trent suggested.

Rachael raised her hand.

"Mr. Hass, could trash be our next study?"

I gotta tell you...it's awfully hard to say no to a request like that. I suggested they take a moment or two coming up with ideas of what we might do or what we might learn about. Their ideas included:

"We could take a field trip to the dump." - Micah
"We could bring someone in to talk to us." - Rachael
"We could collect our lunch trash and see how much each of us produces and then look at the whole class." - Maisy
"We could watch a video to see what happens to the trash at the dump. Do they leave it their or does it go somewhere else?" - Enock
"We could try to write or Skype with the family from Connor's article." - Mr. Hass

We also talked about the possibility of researching to see which products are most wasteful in their packaging and then coming up with alternatives that are less wasteful. I thought about ways we could work as readers, writers, and scientists, and social scientists to frame this topic and share it out with a larger audience. I never imagined as I drove into school today that we might be planning an inquiry into, of all things, trash. However, the more I think about it the more possibilities I see are there waiting to be found. The kids will keep thinking and sharing and we'll soon work out a plan. If you have any good questions, ideas, or information please feel free to pass it along.

Have a great weekend,
Chris