Dear Families,
What a strange first week back to school. The late starts on Tuesday and Wednesday made for unique days in that we ate lunch less than an hour after we started our day. Still, it was probably helpful in that it allowed everyone to ease back in to our school routines with a little extra sleep. There were far fewer yawns on Tuesday and Wednesday than there were on Monday.
Thank you SO, SO much for all the wonderful gifts you sent in during the final days of school before Winter Break. The kids were proud to present them and I was sincerely grateful to receive them. Upon our return, the class was excited to share some things they received, or did, over break. After visiting family in St. Louis, my wife and I flew to Boston for three days to celebrate our 17th anniversary (we were married on New Year's Eve). Boston was frigid and snowy but we had a great time. The picture above shows a jellyfish we saw at the Aquarium while trying to find warm, indoor activities. These jellyfish look as though they have rainbow colored lights pulsing through them but, in fact, this is the external light being refracted (or maybe reflected?) by their bodies. They were very cool!
In math this week we are working on the concept of place value. We've been working with blocks that represent a single unit, a "rod" of ten connected units, a "flat" of 100 units, and a "cube" of 1,000 units. The kids used these on Monday to build fun structures and then give them names. We then toured the room enjoying everyone's creations as well as estimating how much we though they were "worth." Afterward the groups returned to their structures to count them up. A strategy we developed for this work was to first sort all our blocks into 1s, 10s, 100s, and 1000s and then begin counting from the largest unit. The Eiffel Tower consisted of more than 4,000 blocks while the others were in the 100-400 range. It was a fun way to think about counting, estimating, and place value. We'll continue with this work as it leads us to a study of addition and subtraction with regrouping (sometimes referred to as "carrying" and "borrowing").
In reading and social studies we have launched a whole-class study of China. We are using this inquiry to learn about the structure and features of non-fiction texts as well as how to conduct research. Later, the kids will be doing their own research of a country so this collaborative study is also serving to scaffold them into working independently.
We began by looking through a bunch of books from the RCPL to get a glimpse of what we might learn. Next I introduced research folders to the kids. These folders serve as a template for their work.
There are spaces for the kids to record what they think they know to be true about China, what they have found to be correct (transferring our assumptions after confirming their accuracy in a text), new facts they have found to be either important or interesting, and questions they are wondering about as they work. Finally, there's a space that reads "I was SO wrong!" This is where we transfer those early assumptions that proved to be incorrect.
Over the past few days the kids have been seeking out all the information they can find and adding it to their folder using Post-It notes. Today we will begin sorting these fact into categories. As a group we'll figure out what sorts of subcategories make sense for a study of China (houses, schools, holidays, the land, etc).
In writing workshop we have been talking a lot about spelling - specifically, strategies we can use when writing words we don't already know how to spell. The strategies we've come up with so far have been: (1) break the word into syllables and spell out each of the sounds we hear in those smaller chunks, (2) write a vowel in each and every syllable, (3) use the words we already know to help us spell the ones we don't know yet - word families, (4) writing a word two or three different ways and seeing which looks right, and (5) imagining what the word looks like when we read it.
During our research of China someone was trying to type in a search of Chinese festivals but didn't know how to spell the word "festival." She broke it up, wrote out each sound she heard, put a vowel in each syllable, and came up with "festivole." Sure enough, Google recognized what she was wanting and offered a whole host of sites to help her find her information. We used this as an example of how careful spelling (but not always conventional spelling - especially at seven years old) helps us communicate. Communication is the primary goal of writing. As we work to be more mindful about our spelling, read lots and lots of words in our reading, and work to edit our published pieces for accuracy, we continue to become stronger and stronger spellers.
That's it for this week. Warmer weather is on the way!
Chris
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