Newsletter: February 1st, 2017

Our classroom guest, Don Russo, sits in with a group of students to listen to the
original songs they are writing and offer constructive feedback.

Dear Families,

I hope you all are having a great week. We are the midst of quite a few different inquiries and projects. Next week we will begin sorting out work samples from the entire year, reflecting on them, and then finalizing plans for how we might share this with you at our Student-Led Conferences on February 16th and 17th. If you haven't already signed up for a conference time please do so. I sent a link via email earlier in the week.

And now a few updates on our learning.

From Chris

Don Russo, owner of Freeway Music, stopped in on Tuesday to talk about some of
the prewriting strategies he uses when writing original songs. Don is an extremely
accomplished musician who performs all over town and has shared the stage
with national acts. It was a pleasure to hear him share his insights on writing with us.

Don helped us see that being a songwriter is much like being any other sort of writer in
that he carefully observes the world around him, draws meaning from these observations
and experiences, organizes his thoughts for writing, makes multiple drafts, and comes
out the other side with a finished product representing all the hard work he put into its
creation. He was wonderful with the kids. If ever you're looking for a great place for music
lessons I'd highly suggest contacting him at Freeway. 

We've also been writing essays of late. This is in preparation for a state assessment
the kids will have to do in May in which they write to a specific prompt asking them to read
a text, respond to a question, and provide evidence from the text to support their thoughts.

We don't simply practice writing essays so we can do well on an isolated writing test at
the end of the year (a test in which more than half of South Carolina elementary students
did not pass last year). Rather, we're using the idea of essay writing to help us further explore
our existing efforts to support our claims with some sort of evidence. We do this in literature discussions,
book clubs, Morning Meeting discussions, when looking at data sets, etc.

This week the kids were asked to look over a data set our class has compiled of our daily
participation in Morning Milers across the whole school year. The kids were asked to use the
data to explain which 9 week period found us out on the track most often. They could speak
to the number of people going out or the number of laps completed. They could also draw from
data detailing the maximum,  minimum, mode, or median. 

These short responses provided them an opportunity to show they can make inferences from
a data set, use that data to support their claims, and practice writing essays that address
a specific question.

From Shanna

In reading, we finished our biographies on historical figures. Now it’s time to start writing our biographies. On Monday, we began researching our own biographies and collecting information. We used highlighters and sticky notes to help think about what’s important.

As the week progresses, we will begin to organize the information we've collected into categories. Grouping sticky notes will help us begin to think about chapter titles and how to divide our biography.