Newsletter: November 28th

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday break with your families. My family sure
enjoyed having a little time away from the daily grind. As evidenced in the above 
photo, we were even able to get all the kids to smile for a group photo. Other highlights
of my break included: family card games, holiday movies, a 6.5 mile hike near Greenville with
my wife, and buying our oldest daughter her very first car (a used Ford Focus). 

Hey Everyone,

It was so great to see the kids again this week - not to mention all the big hugs I received Monday morning. This is such an affectionate bunch! We jumped right back into our inquiries as well as started one or two new ones. We're currently conducting an author study in reading workshop, editing and revising "free write" pieces in writing workshop, learning to add larger and larger numbers in math, and will soon begin an inquiry into hunger and homelessness in social studies. Here are some highlights of our work...

We've already begun collecting food items for our "Passing of the Cans" food drive. 

We will soon begin an inquiry into hunger and homelessness to better understsand
why our school collects these items, where they go, and the many different sorts
of families who receive them. I work hard to disrupt any stereotypes that might exist
of what it means to need assistance from others. In addition to this inquiry, we also
use the cans as an opportunity to explore large numbers.

The kids have been working to tally the total number of food items we've brought in (40)
as well as the total serving these items will provide (131 so far). 

To calculate these totals, the kids have been working in small groups then
coming back together as a whole group to finalize our calculations. This work
allows us to continue our work around addition with regroupinng. 

Some of this work has allowed us to confront new material - such as
multiple ways of representing a half when writing a number. When the kids
were calculating the servings in these cans they learned most 15 oz cans provide
3.5 servings. We wrote this another way (one that is more familiar to many
of the kids) as evidenced in the photo.

Finally, each table brought their totals to the whole group and we added
them all together. The kids enjoy working in groups to solve larger problems. This
sort of work also provides opportunities for those who are more comfortable solving
these sorts of problems to support others who are still navigating how one goes about
combining large numbers.

Speaking of computation with regrouping, the kids have also been creating word problems

to show how this sort of work can be used in other real world contexts.

I also give the kids a little practice with traditional worksheets - though this accounts
for only a small part of the work we do in the classroom. In the above photo, someone has
worked to solve problems on the "challenge sheet" after having already solved a series of
simpler problems. As always, miscues on this sort of work provide wonderful "teachable
moments" from which to help the kids better understand the work they are doing.

Another engagement from our work around place value and computation found
the kids working with their tablemates to count how many beans were in a bag I had provided.
They used pieces of paper with ten dark circles on each  sheet to divvy the beans into groups of ten.

With ten circles on each piece of paper, the sheets were able to hold a total
of 100 beans. Once all the beans were sorted into groups of 10 and 100, the
kids worked to count how many they had in all at their tables. Finally, everyone
came to the floor and we added all five tables' beans together for a grand total
that exceeded 6,000 beans. Everyone truly had a wonderful time working with
such large numbers. 

We've also been continuing to share class journals and news articles during our
Morning Meeting. The kids are asked to share one of each (a journal and a news
article) each month. Recent questions in the class journals have included: Why do
we sweat when it's cold outside?, Why does clear stuff come out of bugs when you
squish them?, and Why do other languages sound like people are talking so fast?

Today I asked a question of my own after placing it in the Culture Journal. I told the
kids about a news article I read earlier in the day while eating breakfast  about the fact
 our nation is going to need a lot of new nurses over the next few years. From this article, I
asked "Why do we see so many women going into nursing but so few men?" Such questinos
are intended to help the kids see that we can carefully observe the world around us and ask
questions about things we don't quite understand.

I keep record of the specifics of the kids' shares during this structure of our
day. I'm always interested to see what sorts of topics they enjoy exploring together
as well as the ways in which the depth of their questions and hypotheses grow over the
course of our two years together.

Finally, in reading workshop we have launched an author study of Jacqueline Woodson.
During author studies we pay careful attention to all sorts of things. In this particular study
we are focusing on the sorts of topics Woodson chooses to write
about, the types of characters she often includes in her stories, the genres she employs to tell these stories,
and the writing craft she  uses to make her stories so powerful and engaging. Much like our work
with classroom journals, author studies help us learn to observe the world (and the word) more carefully.