Newsletter: May 15

Dear Families,

Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending Ms. Nozsa's hooding ceremony in the Horseshoe. She was one of the featured speakers and spoke so beautifully about the gratitude each of the MATs felt for the kids they had the pleasure of working with this past year. The following day she attended the formal graduation ceremony on campus and then on Monday was offered a job at Windsor Elementary. That is such exciting news. She is going to be a wonderful, wonderful teacher.

Our instructional assistant, Miss Melanie, has also secured a job for next year. She will be teaching in a Montessori classroom at Pontiac Elementary where she'll have a classroom full of first, second, and third graders (and, as you can see from her photo, she is very excited!). Like Ms. Nozsa, she will take so much of CFI with her to a new setting where she'll be both a teacher and a learner among new colleagues, peers, and children.

The kids, of course, were thrilled to hear the great news about both Ms. Nozsa and Ms. Melanie.


This week we have continued our study of multiplication. The kids worked in groups to think of things from the world that come in 2s (bike tires), 3s (sides of a triangle), 4s (legs on a table), 5s (fingers on a hand), 6s (sodas in a pack), 7s (digits in a telephone number), 8s (legs on an octopus), 9s (positions on a baseball field), 10s (toes on both feet), and 12s (inches in a foot). They came up with many, many more than just this. We used these to write and solve multiplication problems. Some of these included...

There are five points on a star. Jada drew five stars. How many points did she draw all together?
There are five tables in each classroom. If the school has nine classrooms, how many tables will there be all together?
There are 12 inches in a foot.  Sandra is five feet tall. How many inches tall is she?

While we will spend a good bit of time working on multiplication next year, including memorizing the time tables, we are getting a good solid start at this work right now. Next we'll spend a bit of time exploring division and then finish the year reviewing some of the things we have learned.

In writing workshop the kids are working to publish the picture books they began writing a few weeks ago. They first studied the illustrations in some of the books in our classroom to see what they noticed these artists doing in their pictures that we might do as well. Working from this list, they made "dummy books" where they sketched their ideas and played around with where their words might go and how they might look.

While part of this work is rooted in learning to create knowledge for ourselves (in this case, studying the work of others, noticing what we like, and trying it on our own), another part of this work is the skill of staying with something for more than just a day or two. These illustrations are a challenge in patience and determination. Learning to work at the same something for an extended period of time is important. And, at times, hard.

We'll continue to work on these each day through next Tuesday. At that time any work that is not finished will come home and need to be completed by Monday, May 26th.

Finally, this morning the kids performed their Seussical Musical, under the direction and preparation of our music/drama teacher Mrs. Brutto. They were very cute and sang beautifully.

 

As always, if you have any questions or need anything please let me know. 

Have a great weekend,

Chris