Thank you so much for finding the time to meet with me to discuss your child’s progress and plan our goals for the upcoming term.  I truly appreciate your time and all the things you are doing at home to support and promote learning.  We have an eager and hardworking class – much of the time.  😀

This week we’ve done our usual reading, writing, problem solving and researching.   We spent time blogging with a winter theme.  We also had a challenge with Mr. Guidi, Open Circle with Ms. Vas and we planned, designed and created a decoration for our door. We are excited to be introducing Bamboo to the school.

Learning More About Place Value with Rounding

This week began a study of estimation.  We hope to answer these questions: What is an estimate?  Why do people estimate? When could we use estimation?  Can we find examples where estimation is used outside of school?

As we make estimates, we will be learning more about place value and rounding up and down to the nearest ten and the nearest hundred.  We’ve learned that to round you look at the digit to the right of the amount you are rounding and then use the rule – 5 and above round up, 4 and below round down.  We’ll be developing this understanding over the next few weeks.

SEL  – Strengthening Relationships

In Open Circle we have been learning ways to strengthen relationships.  We’ve been practicing giving and receiving compliments.  We’ve been learning how to speak up for things we believe in or feel strongly about.  We’ve been finding ways to share our opinions and to accept differences of opinion.  Through role-playing activities we’ve learned the difference between advocating and telling – safety is a big part of our decision making process.  We’ve practiced ways of being a supportive friend by encouraging and looking for the good in each situation and person.  We’ve spent time talking about what a cooperative classroom looks like, sounds like and feels like.

Our challenge with Mr. Guidi was one way for us to show we could apply what we’ve been learning in Open Circle.  Working together to make our gecko door decoration was another opportunity we had to show we could discuss and plan, compromise and collaborate.  We can’t wait to share it with you when we are finished.

Family Story Project – Narrative Writing

This week the children selected the questions they would like to ask in their interview with a family member or family friend.  They tried to create open questions that will lead to stories – they’ll have to see.

We went over the assignment, created copies of the questions and hope to organize all this work in a small notebook.  This information went home in your child’s communication folder on Thursday (a couple children still need to finish this.)  Please help your child, while also following his/her lead.  This is their project.  I hope we can help them step up and take responsibility for all the parts they can do on their own.  Thank you so much for you interest and support.  You may find you need to help your child understand that they don’t have to ask all of the questions on their list – one is fine if it leads to a story. It is also fine if your child gathers a collection of short stories to put together in a collection of memories.

The children will need help with the audio recording.  This is a “just-in-case” measure so the children can re-hear parts or can use exact wording if they choose to.  One of the elaboration strategies we will be learning is the use of dialogue – so the audio might be handy.  I don’t think we’ll need them in the classroom.  I’ll let you know if we do.  The plan is that the children will come back with their interview information when we return in 2019.  Thank you for your help and support with this project.

Bits and Pieces –

• I’ve not received signed slips from every family, so I am hoping you are all aware of our super important Secret Friend Project.  If you’ve not heard anything about this project yet, please email or call me this weekend.  It would be terribly sad if a classmate was left out or receive a gift that was obviously last minute!
• The wrapped gift should be brought to school between Monday, December 17 and Wednesday, December 19. Our Secret Friend Celebration will be on Thursday, December 21.  We’ll eat together in our classroom.  I’ll bring a special dessert for us to share.
• We’re nearly finished reading The Wild Robot Escapes. Roz and Brightbill are in a city and that’s not a great way for our robot to stay anonymous. Talk your child about what’s happening in the story and what they think might happen to Roz as she tries to get out of the city and back to her island.
• We learned more about the spelling rules used when writing comparative and superlative adjectives. To do that we spent more time with long and short vowel sounds.  We’ve learned a bit about syllables too.  We’ll continue this as we learn more about adding suffixes to words.
• Completed interviews and notes are due January 2.We’re hoping the interviews can be completed during the break so we can begin writing in the New Year.
• Our next challenge with Mr. Guidi is on January 2.  (If you’re looking for an updated challenge list, you can find it on the October 26 post on the blog.)

Phew!  What a week – snow, drizzle, warm, cold, wind. Thanksgiving exhaustion coupled with arriving elves excitement has made for a very rambunctious week.  Despite all this, we have begun our national holiday research, created interesting and diverse blog posts, and developed a long list of possible interview questions as we move into the next phase of our family story project.

I hope you noticed the Parent Teacher conference sign-up sheet that was sent home yesterday.  Please let me know if you need to meet at a time different from those offered.  I will be glad to schedule a different time with you.

Crafting Questions that Will Lead to Quality Stories

This week we learned about open and closed questions.  We want to plan interview questions that will inspire storytelling, not single word or sentence answers. We explored the difference between the answers we might expect if we asked, “Do you like pie?” versus asking “What was your favorite family meal when you were growing up?  Can you tell me that story?”

We spent parts of two days thinking about the stories we’d like to collect.  Would they be about things we already knew of, or would we hope to discover something surprising and new?  We created a first round of questions and then thought about them.  We found ways we might tweak our original questions so they could be more open ended to encourage storytelling.

In addition to thinking about how our questions could be answered, we tried to answer them ourselves by doing a quick write to answer one or two of the questions.  Next we will learn about interview protocols so that the children will be ready to conduct their interview sometime in December. Thanks for your help and support with this.

Using a Post-It Note Taking Strategy

Each of the children has chosen a national holiday to research.  There isn’t much information about many of the holidays, so children have to do a lot of inferential thinking to come up with the answers to many of their questions.

In addition to this, we are working to make sure we write our own original thought and understanding in this informational writing project.  The children are reading a page, putting the books aside and writing a post-it about what they think the author was trying to teach them.  It means the research process is slower, but because the children are working in teams they are able to help each other talk through what they understand.

Meeting the Challenge with Cooperation and Communication

This week we met with Mr. Guidi for a challenge.  We were given a rope and asked to make different shapes with it.  We had to make a circle, then a square and a triangle. Our goal was to work together to make the shape – if possible we’d work together as a team to make the shapes while we could see what was happening and then try the challenge over blindfolded to see how well we could cooperate and communicate.

We were able to work through the first step of the challenge, but struggles as a class with focus and behavior so we weren’t able to get to the second part of the challenge. Over the course of the school year we’ll see how our skills at self-control and self-management develop in ways that help our class become more successful so we are able to meet the challenges placed before us.

Bits and Pieces –

• We had a great trip to Strawbery Banke last week.  We learned about how the traditions of Thanksgiving have changed.  We learned about traditions in the 1630’s and later in the 1770’s and still later in the 1820’s.  It was interesting and fun.  Strawbery Banke gave us family passes so you can go as a family to enjoy another of their programs.  Ask your child what he or she thought was most fun – making the corn husk doll, preparing food as they might have done around the hearth, making the charity baskets to share with the needy, learning about harvest festivals from around the world that have influenced our holiday tradition or creating matzo meal for Mrs. Shapiro.
• Our nonfiction Thanksgiving themed book clubs have continued to meet.  I think we are all agreed; living at the time of the Pilgrims would have been hard.  Talk to your child about what he or she learned about this national holiday from this reading.
• We are glad to be reading The Wild Robot Escapes. Roz and the Shareef family she works for just survived a tornado.  We are wondering if Roz will ever see Brightbill again – we think she will and we are wondering how the children will help her escape.  Is she going to be able to leave the family she cares about?
• Thank you for your continued support in helping the children to understand how to calculate elapsed time. I am impressed with how well the children read the analogue clocks.  We’ll keep working through different strategies to record how the time passed.
• During some of our Word Study work we’ve been learning about suffixes.  This week we’ve been working with the rules for how to change a singular noun to a plural.  See if your child can tell you the four different rules we’ve learned about.