Dear Core 2 families,
Student Led Conferences are going to be held March 10th and 11th (Tuesday and Wednesday). Student Led Conferences are an opportunity for your child to share their learning with you and to set learning goals. The goal for SLCs is to get the student talking as much as possible, and as their teachers (both home and school) listen to them. Every student is required to sign up for one 45 minute slot. There will be up to 5 families in the room at a time, circulating between different stations. This year I am also offering the optional opportunity to have a more traditional “parent/teacher” conference. You will notice that the afternoon of both Tuesday and Wednesday are divided into 15 minute parent teacher time slots. You are welcome to sign up for one of these time slots and have a time to sit down with me and share ideas about your child. Again, the parent teacher meetings are optional, but the Student Led Conferences are mandatory. Here is the link to sign up: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0d48a8a729abfe3-march2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please remember to send your kiddos with water bottles and the right utensils for their lunches. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This Thursday and Friday are our next Pizza/Spirit Days. The theme for this Spirit Day will be Crazy Hair/Hat Day. So whip out the gel, blast out the hairspray (sorry environment), dust off that old cowboy hat or braid away! The only thing more fun than eating pizza without a hat is......eating pizza with a hat!! I really enjoyed seeing many of you at PEC #3. I find that I learn so much from all of you when we get together and share ideas!
Speaking of which, a number of parents told me about awesome resources during PEC, and I wanted to pass them on to all of you. Typing: A lot of students are starting to use Keyboarding without Tears at home: http://www.hwtears.com/kwt Kate Vokoun had another typing resource as well: From Kate: If your student is ready, have them try the game below. It is done by the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) and the accent and some of the spellings are not American. However, I liked that it was free, kid-friendly and teaches home keys first in Level 1, much like I learned how to type in high school. And besides, the keyboard is universally the same. Make sure that you encourage your child not to look at the keys as they type. My typing teacher in high school use to always say, “Eyes on your copies.” It wasn’t an exciting class but one that proved valuable because I type pretty fast without looking. Remind them to keep their eyes on the screen. Here is the link to Dance Mat Typing: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z3c6tfr#zgkpn39 Sight Word games: Super Speed 100 and Super Speed 1000 http://www.wholebrainteaching.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=136:superspeed-the-game-of-champion-readers&Itemid=104 Descriptive sentences: http://teacherideafactory.blogspot.com/2012/10/wow-vs-blah-sentences-building-better.html Engineering: TryEngineering offers a variety of lesson plans that align with education standards to allow teachers and students to apply engineering principles in the classroom. http://tryengineering.org/lesson-plans?cat=35&keyword= I hope that you found PEC to be useful, and thank you again for showing up and being such awesome collaborators! This week has flown by! We are hard at work going through our architecture design process, and have begun to talk about the drawings that will accompany the concept design proposal! In tinkering they have been building cars out of tons of cool materials in the Innovation Station. Here are some pictures of their works in progress: Hello Hello!
We have had a lovely week! We have been talking about the “Architecture Design Process” with regards to our structures. Each student has chosen the structure that they will be building, and has started to write a “Concept Design Proposal” for their structure. I met with an architect (thanks Maxine’s dad!) last week to come up with the general outline of what a concept design proposal looks like. We have begun the work of answering the questions: What does the building look like? Feel like? What is it made of? How do people use it? The purpose of this written document is to convince a client that they should be the one to design the building. Most students have answered these questions on a graphic organizer, and will be moving on to their rough draft in the next week. I am hoping to have them document each step of the design process and present the steps at Exhibition J In tinkering last week I came to the conclusion that we need more practice building simple structures before we dive into our more complex structures that will be in the actual city. We will be building simple houses out of cardstock this week to experiment with folding, gluing, cutting, and using different materials. I am hoping that with some practice, we will be able to tackle our more complex structures in the next few weeks. In math, we have been working on subtraction word problems. For some students this looks like simple subtraction problems with numbers less than 30. Students that are comfortable doing simple subtraction problems (mostly 2nd graders) have moved on to learning about subtraction with regrouping. We have looked at word problems such as: Spot the dog buried 76 bones in the backyard. Another dog came along and dug up 38 of the bones. How many bones are still buried in the yard? These problems are very difficult, even for students with a strong understanding of subtraction. We shared different strategies for solving this type of problem. Most students really struggled, and their answer was something along the lines of “well, 70 take away 30 is 40, and 8 take away 6 is 2, so the answer is 42.” I am paraphrasing, but you get the idea. We are working on different ways of thinking about regrouping and breaking the numbers apart in order to be able to do this type of subtraction problem accurately. I would highly recommend giving them some subtraction with regrouping problems several times a week to let them explore how to solve them. In reading and writing we are working on building physics content knowledge. We have been doing small experiments, reading books, and writing about pushes, pulls, motion, force, friction, and inertia. Both Patrick and I feel that the more exposure students have to these abstract ideas, the more solid their understanding becomes. It would not hurt to continue exploring these ideas at home. Announcements: *Our third Parent Educator Conference is next Wednesday! Wed, 2/11 | 9 am - 2:15 pm | Hawthorne Memorial Center · * Work Journals due by this Friday!!! Please get them in by 4:15, and check for signatures! · *There is a small outbreak of lice on campus. Please check your kids regularly, and have chats about not touching other people’s hair. · * Valentine’s Day: If your student would like to bring valentines for their classmates, I will set aside time on Tuesday February 10th and Thursday, February 12th for students to exchange cards. Please make sure they have one for everyone in class (exactly 20 students in each cohort), no names on cards (it makes it take a very long time to pass out when there are names), and no candy or any type of sweets. Thanks! · * I will be uploading the new Work Journal and Math Unit by the end of the day (under Learning Goals) |
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February 2017
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