Newsletter: Friday, 12/6

Dear Families,

Though we're just weeks from our Winter Break there are a lot of things going on. I'm going to begin with a few items I need to pass along about upcoming events before moving on to share out some of our curricular studies.

Winter Feast
As you have heard, in place of a traditional Winter Party full of sweets we are going to plan, prepare, and consume a grand feast! Today the kids and I worked to agree on the sorts of foods we want to eat. The categories were: main dishes, side dishes, and desert. I shared a number of cookbooks for inspiration. We will have an assortment of soups, breads, fruit, cookies, and so on. Next week we will work as both readers and mathematicians to read the recipes, solve how many servings we'll need of each, and create a shopping list of all the needed ingredients. The money you have sent in will be used to do a big shop for everything. The kids will not be shopping (although I'm sure they'd love to, the walk to Bi-Lo is NOT a very safe one).

We have a number of volunteers coming in on Thursday, 12/19 to help up prepare the food. There will be one or two adults with each small group of kids. Each group will be responsible for preparing one item for our feast. There will be a few items (cookies, breads, etc) that will need to be baked. These will be taken home and put in the oven by a few of the volunteers and then sent back in the next morning. The other items will all be taken care of here at school (crock pots, refrigerators, and so on).

Our actual feast will take place on Friday, 12/20 at 11:00. If you can get away, we'd love to have you. If you can't, no worries! I'll post plenty of pictures on the blog.

Food Drive
CFI is currently hosting a canned food drive. We will be collecting non-perishable food items in each classroom over the next two weeks. To better understand this effort, our class is currently using our literature study of genres to read texts around the topics of poverty and homelessness. After compiling a list of questions we had about these topics we wrote letters to various people in our community who might be able to correspond or even visit us. If you know of anyone please pass their names along as well.

And now, a rundown of what we've been up to in our curricular studies...

We've been working with blocks and graph paper to identify different ways of making a rectangle using the same number of blocks. This has helped introduce conversations about area, perimeter, and right angles.

The kids worked collectively as well as individually.

This experience will later help us understand the concept of multiplication.

Having just finished a genre study of memoir writing, the kids are now enjoying some free-writing time.

With free-writing they can write within any genre they enjoy.

Our year is split up with about half our writing studies occurring within dedicated genre studies and the other half open to all genres.

No matter what sort of genre (or non-genre) we are studying, we always begin our writing time with a mini-lesson addressing some sort of writing craft or convention. Writing is a time to "making stuff" in our notebooks.

In social studies we're exploring the question "What is normal?"

We'll use this question to consider who has the power to decide what "normal" is. We'll also see ways people use the notion of normalcy to make fun of, belittle,and oppress others.

We began this study with a conversation about what the kids see as a "normal" second grader. They worked in groups to create murals depicting their mental image of this.

Next week they'll share these murals with the class. We will use these presentations to discover how it is we have come to name what normal means to us. Is it what's popular?

The culmination of this study will be to study other cultures and counties - but with a new lens. These studies will grow into our first Expert Project of the year. Almost all of this work will occur in the classroom.

Have a great weekend,
Chris