Happy Wednesday Everyone!
We have been hard at work here in Core 2! In Reading we have been building our Word Sort routine, including writing 5 silly sentences with our word sort words. If you are still wondering if Word Sorts would be a good fit for your homeschooling- please reach out and we can chat. We have also been building our routine around reading our leveled readers. Students are in a group made up of students who are at the same reading level. I give them an appropriate Reading A-Z book and they read it together. Throughout the year I will introduce different strategies that I want them to try out while reading, or reading comprehension work that I would like for them to do. This week it was retelling the story (Beginning, Middle, and End). The idea of figuring out what is important about the beginning, middle, and end of a story is a topic that we are covering in depth during Writer's Workshop, so it is great to see their understanding of what they are reading build as well. I have been chipping away at doing each student’s individual reading assessment (DRA). Please reach out if you are needing to know their updated DRA score and I will get that to you as soon as possible. I wanted to mention that it is vital that your child is reading out loud to an adult for at least 20 minutes a day at home. At this age, they need the daily practice in order to progress. In Math we have been continuing our daily number talks and word problems. I loved hearing that some of you tried writing word problems at home this week! If you are interested in the book that I used to learn how to write meaningful word problems, it is called Children’s Mathematics. It is not a curriculum, but rather a really wonderful tool to help you learn how to write word problems and have your student solve them: https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Mathematics-Cognitively-Guided-Instruction/dp/0325001375 In Writer's Workshop we have continued our work on writing narratives, and specifically true stories. This week we focused on adding labels and speech bubbles to our drawings. This can be really helpful for students, as anything that is labeled can then be used to build sentences. Speech bubbles are a really fun way to start adding dialogue in their writing. Please feel free to encourage students to do this at home as well! For our Election Project, we have started to focus on campaigning. We read a really great book called “Grace for President” and students had a chance to write a speech to try to get people to vote for Grace or for her opponent Thomas. It has been really fun to see students building their understanding of the complex world of government and politics. One of the main things that I am hoping to get to in this project is debating. I love all of the skills that go into debating: arguing, listening, persuading etc. I would like to encourage you to watch the upcoming Presidential debate with your child (Monday Sep 26th). This year is such a crazy one in politics that I am obviously unable to say whether the entire debate will in fact be appropriate for kids, so if you are feeling nervous about that, wait until after and preview parts of it on YouTube before you watch them with your child. I would really like for students to experience the debate so that they can begin to build an understanding of what a debate is, and how candidates go about trying to convince people to vote for them. Here is an article about watching the debates with kids, and how to get the most out of it: http://ourwhitehouse.org/presidential-debates-watch-the-debates-with-your-kids-and-teens/ We have also begun to learn about political songs and how they are used to voice dissatisfaction or a desire for change. We started with “Times they are a Changin” by Bob Dylan. We have been singing it in class and having discussions about what he might be trying to express in the lyrics. The song is full of figures of speech and it has been really interesting to talk with students about idioms like “drenched to the bone” and similes like “sink like a stone.” Feel free to listen to the song at home or dive deeper into other protest/ political songs. MAP Testing This next week we are going to be doing MAP testing. This Thursday and Friday we will be doing the Language Arts Assessment, and Monday and Tuesday we will be doing the Math Assessment. Please make sure your student comes to school rested and with plenty of healthy snacks. Student Led Conferences: Student led Conferences are going to be held on October 4th and 6th this semester. SLCs are an opportunity for your child to share their experience in the classroom, reflect on their learning, and set learning goals. Each student must sign up for one 45 minute block of time, there will be 4-5 families in each block. Sign up: www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0d48a8a729abfe3-october3 Please remember that there is no school on these days, and that you are expected to homeschool. Please reach out if you have any questions, I look forward to seeing you! Hello! I had a wonderful time connecting with many of you during PEC 2 and parent teacher conferences over the last 2 weeks. I am so grateful to work with such a thoughtful group of people, and I love having the chance to connect! I hope you are all starting to feel up and running for the new school year, but if you are feeling stuck, please reach out. We have been hard at work here in Core 2! In Reading, we have been learning/ practicing doing word sorts. For those of you that came to my PEC workshop, we have built up the routine to where the students can cut out the sort, sort, write the words, and write the rule. We will be working on building in extension activities over the next week. For those of you interested in doing word sorts at home, I am using the Words Their Way books, here is an example: https://www.amazon.com/Words-Their-Way-Alphabetic-Three-hole/dp/0135145805/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473695752&sr=1-1&keywords=words+their+way+letter+name In math, we are doing number talks and word problems, with a focus on addition and subtraction. I would love if you experimented with doing word problems at home. Here are some examples of word problems that you could have your student do during homeschooling, feel free to change the number size to suit your child: 8 boys and 7 girls were playing baseball. How many children were playing baseball? Mike has 16 mice and Joy has 31 mice. How many more mice does Joy have than Mike? Mark has 19 crayons. Elijah has 15 more crayons than Mark. How many crayons does Elijah have? Patrick has 24 chairs. Robin gives him some more chairs, now he has 40 chairs. How many chairs did Robin give him? Please feel free to play around with number size/ names/ situation. Students are working on showing their mathematical thinking (not just an answer) and sharing their thinking with each other. In Writer’s Workshop, we are continuing our work with narrative writing, focusing on building stamina, incorporating beginning, middle, and end into our own writing, and knowing where we are in the Writing Process. Here is the Writing Process poster that I have on our wall: I check in with students periodically to find out where they are in the Writing Process, in order to allow them to begin to track their own progress through the steps. We have done lessons on the first 4 steps, but are still learning about the last two steps. That means that your child may have some preliminary ideas about revising and editing, but not in depth knowledge.
Our “It’s Party Time” Project is definitely up and running! We have spent the last 2 weeks building background knowledge on democracy, government, presidents, voting and elections. These are very big ideas that a lot of the students are struggling to understand. It would be great if you had conversations about these ideas at home in order to help them expand their understanding. Some of the resources that we have used at school that could definitely be explored further at home are: Brainpop Video on Democracy: https://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/worldhistory/democracy/ Brainpop Jr Video on Presidents: https://jr.brainpop.com/socialstudies/government/president/ Brainpop Jr Video on local and state government: https://jr.brainpop.com/socialstudies/government/localandstategovernments/ PBS Website on what government does in a city: http://pbskids.org/democracy/my-government/ These videos/ websites are worth further exploration. Even if you just watch them with your child and pause to have clarifying conversations-that would help your child develop a richer understanding of these complex ideas. Upcoming Dates: Scooter's Jungle Fundraiser September 13th, 5-8pm (must pre-pay for tickets!) Buy your tickets in the front office ASAP! Children's tickets are $12 each and adults' are $5. Pizza and bake sale goodies will be available for purchase. If you can donate water or bake sale items, please sign up here. Don't forget to bring your socks! This is not a drop-off event...please supervise your children! Proceeds from this event will help us pay for the space rental and lunch for PEC 1! Plus it's an awesome opportunity to hang out with your DVIA friends! |
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February 2017
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