Newsletter: February 1, 2013

Dear Families,

Thanks to everyone who could make it out for Curriculum Night last night. I enjoyed listening in on the many conversations happening around the room. So much of our learning is social - during every phase of our life. It's rare to learn anything without the support of dialogue. Even when we think we are learning "on our own" we are accessing the many conversations and social experiences from our past that support this new learning. For this reason the role of talk in the classroom is crucial. We work each day to build on each other's ideas and to make connections between our lives, the texts we read, and the world beyond our immediate community. A great strength of our, and any, classroom is that each of the kids have their own strengths, interests, perspectives, and experiences to bring to these conversations. We truly learn from one another each and every day.

 Here is an update on current and future items of interest...

Next week we will begin working to prepare for our Student-Led Conferences. If you have not already signed up for your conference please do so very soon. The forms are located at the front of the building.

Last week the kids considered a variety of issues in regards to "Who Should Choose- Individuals of the Government?". We tallied the kids responses. We found that there were 60 occasions when someone thought the government should choose (make a law, etc) and 27 occasions when someone thought individuals should choose. We used this to help us better understand the concept of state's rights vs federal mandates and laws.

Our new MAT, Mr. Chris, has been working with the class on their memoir writing this past week. Next week he will be teaching about analog clocks as well.

We had a Brazilian visitor last week. Her name was Beatrice. She is 15 years old and spending her summer (yes, it 's summer in Brazil) here working on her English skills. We enjoyed her presentation.

We sorted coins this week. We were trying to discover how old these dimes, quarters, nickels, and pennies tend to be. We had learned last week that one dollar bills are only in circulation for about 18 months on average. We're looking to see if the same is true for coins. Based on some 60 year old nickels we came across we're beginning to think the answer is "NO."

Here's a class graph we created with Post-It notes to analyze the dates from a sample of pennies. Because the kids dug through the penny bucket for certain dates they wanted we could not draw any reliable results from this work. We talked about the need for the samples to be random.

Here is a group sorting their quarters by five-year increments. Can you guess which coins tend to be oldest? Newest? Why might this be?