We have had another awesome week in Core 2! We ended last week talking about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott and creating photo essays around her life. I was beyond inspired by your kids ideas and feelings surrounding her life and the complicated ideas of racism and injustice. This week we begun studying the Wright Brothers. We are focusing on creating physical objects as artifacts and have therefor begun our creation of "flying machines." We will hopefully be flying our flying machines (kites and paper airplanes) at the end of this week :) Jose has joined our class this week during reading time, and the students are beginning to work in small groups. We have primarily been getting used to this change, but we will begin focusing on inference in this next week.. The students have also begun to do word sorts on their own. If word sorts are something that you would like to try at home, please feel free to stop by after school and I can show you ours for some inspiration :) During math we have begun to do word problems that involve subtraction. For those of you who went to Helen Chan's workshop at Jumpstart 2, I have been trying to incorporate her ideas of having students share strategies with each other, and to challenge them to try and solve problems using different strategies. We have also started to talk about odd and even numbers. It seemed to me that most students are comfortable telling whether a one digit number is odd or even, but struggle when it is a 2 digit number. This would be an interesting topic to discuss with your child, and if you notice that they are struggling with 2 digit numbers, review the idea of looking at the ones place! We had discussed handwriting practice at Jumpstart, and I forgot to include the link to buy the handwriting without tears book: http://www.hwtears.com/hwt Again, this is just an option, but I believe a lot of your kiddos would benefit from some handwriting practice. Feel free to get the 1st or the 2nd grade book, depending on your child's needs. There is also a handwriting workshop today (Wednesday, Sep 24th) from 6:30-8:00pm here on campus that looks very helpful. Okay. So I know that you have had to be patient with me as I learn all of the ins and outs of the Work Journal process, and I want to thank you for that. I believe that I have a much better idea now of what is expected of everyone (parent, child, and teacher) when it comes to the Work Journal. Going forward this is what I am looking for on the work journal: 1. All forms signed in ink and dated. 2. Work samples listed with same title as on Work Journal. 3. Work Samples with name (written by student) date and annotations (written by the parent). I know we discussed this at Jumpstart, and I have decided to ask the parents to please make some kind of annotation on each Work Sample. 4. Daily Engagement with initials on all of the days where you did at least 20 minutes of academic work. 5. Enough activities/ lessons listed to show rigorous home learning. I came across this really interesting article on music and rhythm and its relationship to reading that I wanted to share with you. I also wanted to share the writing tips that Patrick made up for his workshop, in case you missed it at Jumpstart 2: As always, please let me know if you have any questions about class work, projects, work journals, or anything else :) am looking forward to another fun filled week with your kiddos! '
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AuthorWelcome to Robin's Core 2 Blog! Archives
February 2017
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