Newsletter: January 25, 2017

Dear Families,

I hope you all had an opportunity to read through your child's progress reports. These Standards-Based Reports may be less informative (or at least differently informative) than the narrative ones you receive after the first and third quarters but they do offer you an opportunity to see how your child is progressing in relation to various strands of the state standards. As always, if you have any questions be sure to catch me before or after school or shoot me an email.

This newsletter is the first in which our new MAT, Ms. Wilson, will begin sharing information about the classroom alongside me. From now until April we'll be splitting the newsletter so she can learn more about parent communication and the possibilities of a classroom newsletter. To help make this clear, each newsletter will feature sections labeled "From Chris" and "From Shanna".  Here we go...

From Chris

As part of our study of Colonial America and the American Revolution, the kids have been
learning about various groups of people living within the colonies. This has included: newcomers, servants,
goodwives, Puritans, apprentices, and more. To do this, the kids were placed into groups of three
and given a three-page resource telling about one of these groups. The kids then read these together, determined
what constituted the most important information, and highlighted these passages.

The catch was that they had to agree upon what was most important. Often times, when
equipped with a highlighter, the kids will color every single line neon yellow. This is because
everything seems, in the moment, to be important to them. To combat this, we asked the kids to read one full
paragraph at a time, go back and discuss what felt important, debate their choices, then highlight what
they decided upon. This helped them more carefully weigh one piece of information against another. 

The kids did a beautiful job. I was incredibly impressed with 

not only how hard they worked at this but how well they worked

together as small groups to discuss and decide. Today they took  the information they gained

about their Colonial group and paired up with a student in the classroom who studied a different group to compare

and contrast their lives. Each pair  then began to collaborate to co-write a comparative essay

detailing these similarities and differences.

The kids are also wrapping up their unit on songwriting. Not only has this been an opportunity to learn about song structure, rhyme pattern/scheme, and meanings, but we've had a lot of fun too. In the next week or two (as we transition into nonfiction writing) we'll invite a small audience in to hear us perform our finished songs. In the meanwhile, here are a few videos of some of the kids performing their original pieces today. These songs have not been revised or practiced all that much yet but you can already see a lot of progress is being made.

From Shanna

In Reading Workshop, we are continuing to explore biographies. This week we began to identify various features of biographies. So far, we have identified over ten items that make biographies different from fiction text. Students are thinking deeply about those features and how they compare and contrast to novels they read during independent reading. We are also asking ourselves, “What are these features and why are these features important?” We are asking these questions to support the students in writing their own biographies.