Newsletter: Thursday, January 7

Happy New Year! It's great to be back in the swing of things with the kids. Here is a quick summary of the work we're doing together right now....

Reading
This week we are working to determine importance in regards to the information we receive when reading a text. Though this is a process we employ across all sorts of texts, we are looking specifically at news articles to learn the importance of "sorting out" the information we are provided. If you've ever asked your child to tell you about their book and five minutes later they are still reciting every little detail, you know what I mean!

Our work, then, is to begin thinking about what sorts of information we expect from a news article, find it, then report it out. Right now we are working with the questions What?, When?, Why?, How?, Where?, and Who? We are also beginning to think about what the information in these texts means to us - what it makes us think and how it makes us feel. The first article we read together dealt with the health issues of overly heavy school backpacks. The second article was about Mark Zuckerman and his wife giving away 99% of their wealth to help others.


Writing
In writing we have been working on a new class song to share at Gathering next week. It is about how writers must read to learn about their craft from other writers. We have a handful of verses and I hope it will be complete in time for our Gathering. If not, we'll share what we have so far and finish it up later.

Tomorrow we are beginning a poetry unit in our writing workshop. We'll study all sorts of different poems to see how they are similar and how they are different. We'll learn about rhythm and cadence. We'll find out how features such as stanzas and line breaks inform our reading. And, of course, we'll write lots of poems ourselves. It should be a good time.


Math
We've been reviewing what we learned about regrouping before the break as well as working to solve a variety of different word problems. This is work we will continue to come back to again and again over the course of the year. Next we will move on to a study of money.


Science
This week we launched an inquiry into weather. The kids had all sorts of interesting questions about weather. Some included...Why are clouds white?, Why do tornadoes go to the same places?, How often does lightning strike during a storm?, How does snow form?, How do weather forecasters know what the weather will be like? and many, many more.

So far we have been talking about how we can collect data about the weather by observing with our senses and using specific tools to take measurements. Each day we collect each sort of information in our weather journals. As of now we are using websites to give us the data we need. However, in the coming weeks we'll begin to develop and use our own tools as much as possible.