Newsletter: Community Project and Other Updates, May 23rd

Dear Families,

A few weeks ago I emailed you to explain a community project our class decided to take on over the last few weeks of our school year.  This idea stemmed from a news article one of the kids shared about traveling libraries. These are mobile libraries (van, truck, burro) across the globe that visit remote areas where access to books are limited or areas where children do not have many books in their homes. Knowing how important literacy is to economic mobility, these programs make it their aim to support literacy learning in spaces where there is a need. This news article reminded me of a book titled Biblioburro about a Colombian, Luis Soriano, who travels by burro to remote villages to share his wealth of books with children who not have access to libraries. He began eighteen years ago with 70 books and now, thanks to donations, has more than 4,800.

I posed the possibility to the class of supporting similar efforts around us. There are charities that provide books to barbers to hand out to children as well as to pediatricians. One of our fifth graders, Emma Ashley, is currently working on a similar project with Oliver Gospel Mission's Toby's Place - a shelter for women and children. A parent in our classroom told me about a need for books at a library they'll be visiting in the Philippines over the summer.

The kids seemed very interested in working on thisl. We discussed the possibility of each of them thinking of a community they belong to (church, neighborhood, sports team, etc) where they could host their own book drive. We also discussed other ways of supporting a book drive - such as finding a few gently used books from home to donate or doing extra chores to raise a little money to purchase books. Our plan is to bring all our collections together by Tuesday, June 5th. We have lots of great options for where to donate the books and will use the next two weeks formalizing these plans. In the meantime, please encourage your child to participate at whatever level is most comfortable for you all.

This project will play nicely into the work they will do as 5th graders when they are asked to identify an issue/cause they feel passionately about, research it, and develop a plan of action.

In other parts of our studies...

The presentations of the Home Motion Experiments went so well!

The kids each shared their questions, procedures, data, and findings with the class.

I was so impressed by the work they did at home. I was also impressed by the quality
of the questions everyone asked at the conclusion of each presentation. We definitely
needed to be on our toes when presenting these out!

After these formal presentations we also had a chance to share our work with
Mr. Foote and Mr. O'Keefe's classes.

The kids were proud of the work they did at home with you.
I hope you all enjoyed this as much as they did.

In math we've been exploring probability. In this photo we are tallying the number
of times each sum comes up when rolling two dice and adding them together.

We found that 6, 7, and 8 come up most often. We then worked to figure out why
these three numbers had the greatest probability of being rolled. What we discovered
was that there are many different dice combinations that add up to 6, 7, and 8. This was
not  the case with other numbers.

Last week we watched a video titled "The Lie." In the video, a group of 4th graders
share lies they've heard told about the groups they self-identify with (Muslim, Black, female, etc).
Afterward, I asked the kids to talk about what they were thinking and feeling when they watched
these kids speak to harmful stereotypes. The discussion they built around this was so thoughtful.
Fortunately, Dr. Mills was visiting and pulled out her video camera to capture the power of
their thoughts and feelings. Finally, we discussed what each of us could do to stop such
stereotypes from being spread by others. Ideas ranged from standing up for others to making
sure each of us are always working to learn more about other people. 

We continue, each morning, to start our day with Morning Meeting. This is a time for
the kids to share news articles or pose questions in our Class Journals they want us to
discuss together.

A number of days ago one of the kids asked "Why is there always so much
bad news on the news?" What a great question! I suggested we spend a week or so
exploring the idea of "bad" news, how it is shared, how often it is shared,
and why it is shared.

First, we started looking at the front page of The State newspaper and deciding which stories
were "bad," "good," "mild," or seemingly plain old information. Of course, there's some
value judgments in deciding which articles fit which categories. We don't always agree but the
discussions we've had around this have been really interesting. We also created posters to show
how the kids wanted to define what counts as a bad article as well as the helpful and hurtful
aspects of such articles. 

Tomorrow we will discuss how different types of news travels around our
classroom as well. Some is good, but there are times when much of this "news"
is bad. We often refer to this as gossip. 

On Friday Judi Gatson, from WIS, will visit our Morning Meeting
to hear about the thinking we've been doing around this question and to
offer her perspective as someone who works delivering news to the community.
We can't wait to hear what she thinks.