Newsletter in Photos, August 28th

It's been warm and sunny at recess this week. We tend to have two groups on the playground - the ballgame group and the pretend play group. The ballgame group often plays O-ball while the pretend play group creates spas, hotels, and fantasy lands.

As the kids walk in each morning there are  procedures on the board letting them know what they need to do. It always begins with tallying whether they have home or school lunch. Occasionally there is morning work such as a math or cursive sheet. This is also when they have Explorations. Explorations runs until 8:30 and is a time for doing the things they love. 

One choice is to write in a classroom journal. These are places where they can record their observations, knowledge, and questions. 

Once they record what they are thinking they can share it out during Morning Meeting. In this photo Kaleel is writing in the science journal about a toad he found under his trashcan at home. Others have shared algebra problems, questions about the use of "dived" and "dove" and English words translated into foreign languages.

Of course, chess is always very popular!

As is origami.

Every so often I'll put out a survey for the kids during Explorations. We use these to construct graphs of all sorts. Our first one this year asked them "What are you most looking forward to in 3rd grade?" Their options were: (1) new lunch tables, (2) class camping trip, and (3) having a 1st grade reading buddy. The camping trip gained the most votes.

Morning Meeting runs from 8:30 until around 9:00. The kids share their journals as well as new articles. So far this year I have done all the sharing of news articles but that will change soon. I've shared about the upcoming governor race in South Carolina, "Experts Forecast a Win for Haley", the pros and cons of the ice bucket challenge, "Dashing Cold Water on Charitable Causes", and the events in Ferguson, Missouri, "The Tragedy of Ferguson." After sharing the multiple accounts of what happened in Ferguson I asked the kids to summarize what they had heard. As they read them back it became obvious how different people can retell the same story in such different ways. Much of this may have come from conversations at home. I summed it up by pointing out how hard it is for people to agree on what happened - even people who are eye wtinesses - and what this might mean as we study history this year. I also wondered aloud how our study of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movements might be understood in terms of racial relationships in 2014. We'll begin to pull that apart a bit over the course of the year.

In reading workshop the kids have just finished up sharing their Summer Reading Projects. 

We used their summer reading data to create graphs. This one shows which books read this summer were fiction and which were non-fiction. It stretched all the way across the classroom. 

Here are the results!

Feeling like we needed more room, we moved out to the Gathering Room to make another graph. This one asked which books were picture books, chapter books, graphic novels, websites, and informational texts with photograph and illustrations. We later made more graphs using a survey on the Chromebooks. 

We are plugging away on our cursive  We are about half way through the lower case letters.

We generally learn two or three letters each day. My hope is to be finished with this in about three more weeks so we can move on to other things in writing workshop.

Thanks so much for your help with the maps at home. The kids have come in and shared with us the different places they've been to across the state of South Carolina. They'll share their US travels with us next Tuesday. This morning Olivia's mother came in to talk about maps. She demonstrated how the police use maps to track crime as well as how meteorologists use maps to track weather systems. The kids enjoy maps but they were especially excited to ask questions about police work!

Our instructional assistant, Mrs. Shealy, helped the kids and I research information about composting. We gathered lots of really interesting and important information that we plan to share with  the other classes next week. We will also develop a composting plan for the entire school.

The kids accessed two websites, one on-line Power Point, and a You Tube video to gather their information. Each of these sources are posted just below this newsletter. 

A few of the kids started thinking about how to organize their notes to make them easier to read and understand. They'll  soon help others begin to think of possibilities for this work as well.