Congratulations to all the talented children in our school, and especially in our class who braved the crowd and performed for us last night in the Talent Show.  What a wonderful night of song, dance and music.  It was fun.  You obviously practiced long and hard to give a great performance.  Perhaps you’ll become the next Garry Krinsky – what do you think?  Maybe at the next talent show we’ll see juggling….balancing feathers…how about a ladder on your chin?

Thank you to P.A.L. for bringing Toying with Science to our school.  The children thoroughly enjoyed the presentation. Our class was amazed by all they saw.   They loved the show.  They also appreciated knowing how much planning, time and practice was behind each amazing act.

The Choices We Make

SEL – Self-Awareness

This week we began a conversation centered on choices.  At first the class didn’t fully realize how many choices they make in a day…in an hour…in a minute.  Until you begin to think about choices, it often feels as though you do what you have to do waiting for that one time when you can do whatever you want.  But we’ve discovered there is more to choice than that.

We began our conversation with Dust of Snow by Robert Frost.  After learning that rued meant to “regret and feel badly about” our discussion began.  It was easy to know really good and bad choices.  But what about the little ones or the ones we don’t really consider.  We discussed choices that aren’t horrible but might not be so good.  That led us to consider how those choice could become bad or even horrible over time if they add up.

One example Joe used was choosing a math problem that wasn’t really a challenge.  You might do a problem once because the steps for solving it weren’t clear at the beginning.  But once you knew it would be easy to solve, choosing that kind again would not be good for you AND it could also not be good for others because the problem the needed would not be there as a choice.

This conversation is also leading us to learn about metaphorical thinking.  We realized that “You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water” meant more than being at the ocean.  Those thoughts connected us back to our learning goal work when we discovered that a goal remained a wish until we made an action plan.  We realized we aren’t all going to know our math facts if we don’t actually work to know them – and work hard at it.

The final piece of our choice conversation this week was centered on the fable, The North Wind and the Sun.  (You can click on the title for one version of the fable.) The class discovered that competing and feeling the need to be better than others often makes you angry and frustrated.  The moral that force and anger don’t work as well as kindness and being “in your happy place” made sense to our class.  Garrett connected that back to the Habits for Success by pointing out that the Sun was able to do what the wind could not because he was confident, in control, content, and behaving so its true zest showed through.  It is great when one learning conversation connects to another in a chain of learning.

Becoming Proficient – with Multiplication facts

            We talked about what it means to be proficient with regard to multiplication facts.  Gabby helped us understand the meaning of proficient by pointing out that we could think of it as working efficiently and like a pro.  You’d be really good at it and do it easily.  Our goal is to be able to do 70 fact problems in six minutes or less with 98% accuracy – several times in a row.

This week we took the first timed test.  The student scores ranged from 13 to 58 accurate problems.  They developed plans for practicing both at school and at home.  At first we hoped we all meet our goal by the end of March, but are now thinking it would be more reasonable to set April vacation as our target date.  When we talk about it in class the children are very earnest in their commitment to doing this work.  I know that that there’s nothing glamorous about memorizing math facts so it often gets set aside.  Any help you could give with that would be greatly appreciated.  Salute, Multiplication War and Tiguous are three games the children have that support repeated practice of facts.  Math Bingo is a fun app if you have that option and of course there are the games activities on the eboard too.

Calvin made the suggestion that we begin a LYM Club (Learn Your Multiplication) one day after school.  I’m all for that.  I was hoping to ask the class what day might work best today (but no school) so please look for that notice on Monday.

We’ve also been working on recording our thinking and understanding with reading – what does it mean to respond deeply to our reading.  We have continued research and learning about topic sentences and paragraphing.  We are exploring fractions and equivalence.  We are learning what fair shares are all about.

Bits and Pieces –

• We’ll be having a challenge with Mr. Caron on Tuesday – we should be ready to be outside just in case.
• Field Trip to the Shepard-McAuliffe Discovery Center – We will be going to the planetarium on Thursday, March 14.  Thank you for being available to chaperone – I have left those slips at school and was planning to confirm with you today.  Please be on the look out for an email, or call over the weekend.
• Report Cards will be sent to you on Friday, March 15.
• 3E Museum Night – we’d like to invite you to our second museum of the year, one that shares all we have been learning about space.  We hope you’ll be able to attend our museum on Tuesday, March 19 from 6:15 to 7:15 pm.

Enjoy your weekend!