Newsletter: May 29, 2012

Dear Families,

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the movie and pizza. It was great fun. I hope you enjoyed the CDs on the ride home. It's fun to see the kids take pride in becoming singer/songwriters. This CD project was a learning process for me. In the past I have had someone come into the classroom and do the recording, mixing, copying, and packaging. Thanks to your generous gift at Winter Break, and with a bit of assistance and a good amount of trial-and-error, I can now do all this on my own. We have many extra copies in the classroom to give special guests as a thank you for their visit. We gave out our first CD last week to Dr. Susi Long who visited us from USC to talk about her visit to Sierra Leone last summer as well as the time she spent teaching abroad in England, Iceland, and Germany.

Mr. O'Keefe's class also makes CDs each year and uses them as a fundraiser for a cause relating to their classroom study. This year they have been raising money for Rwandan Hugs. This is the same non-profit organization our class and Mrs. Pender's class have been working to support.  Between the three classes we raised about $2,000. This money will go toward purchasing 40 goats for families in need. Thank you so much for your support of our efforts.

Over the past few months we have also been working to bring in items for the Camden Animal Shelter. We now have a nice big box full of towels, food, and toys to share with the animals. As much as I would have loved to set up a field study where we could personally deliver these items and help out around the shelter, the building is too small to accommodate all of us. So I will be delivering the supplies. I know they will be so thankful for the efforts of each and every member of our classroom.

Feeling connected to our community, our school, and our classmates has been a major component of our curriculum this year. This will continue into next year as well. I once read a line from a fellow teacher who wrote "I had gone off to be a teacher, asking myself from time to time if it might be possible to teach English in such a way that people would stop killing each other." This really resonated with and inspired me. We can learn to read and write, work with numbers, and develop an understanding of our history and natural world within the context of making the world a better place.  The best example is our reading and writing workshop. So long as we are working to build understanding from texts we may as well access texts with themes that address important issues such as friendship, responsibility, caring for the earth, standing up for others, appreciating and respecting difference, etc.

Our most recent study was to look at fairy tales in a way that allowed us to analyze the messages they sometimes send about gender. We read a variety of stories and watched one of Disney's more well-known titles to see what we noticed. The kids found that boys are much more likely to save themselves or others from danger than girls are, girls are portrayed as being beautiful but they often do not have other attributes of importance (such as intelligence, bravery, or strength), and wealth, marriage, and royalty are the primary goals of female characters. We wondered if publishers and producers of such stories and movies are aware of the messages they are sending about girls so we launched a letter writing campaign. The kids chose to write letters sharing their concern and offering possible solutions to Scholastic, Disney, The State, parents, and teachers. Congrats to each of them for taking action!

We're now enjoying our last few days of second grade together. We're finishing up a few stories, singing some songs, wrapping our brains around some really challenging math problems, and thinking about ways we might say goodbye to the fifth grade.

Chris

After reading our fairy tales with you at home we created a graph to show which were "great", "good", "okay", and "bad." The winner was - GREAT!

Of the five fairy tales with a female lead, four made beauty a very important characteristic.

Here is the list of people the kids chose to write to.

Addressing an envelope to Walt Disney Studios. The request: more fairy tales with a strong female lead.

Tallying to see which sums come up most often when rolling two dice together. As a class we collected more than 500 sums to graph.

The kids went out and conducted their own probability graphs and predictions. This time around there were bags with five colored tiles in them. The kids made a series of blind draws, recorded the result, and then predicted how many of each color was in the bag.

A visit from Dr. Susi Long. She told us about her trip with a group of educators to Sierra Leone last summer.