Newsletter: November 20th

Dear Families,

What a busy time of year! From grandparent visits to zoo trips to pajama day to Thanksgiving break, there is lots going on right now. I was lucky enough last week to attend the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Conference in Houston. Thousands of teachers came together to teach and learn from one another in community. The focus of the conference was Raising Student Voice and centered on efforts within education to make our classrooms and curriculum not only equitable to every student's needs but a vehicle for creating a more just society. This is work I've been pursuing in the classroom for a number of years and it was wonderful to see so many teachers and schools across the country dedicating themselves to similar investments in such powerful ways.

One of the sessions I attended detailed the work teachers had done to interrogate their classroom libraries to see how often various social groups and family structures were represented in the books their kids pulled off the shelves. The importance of this was to ensure every child had opportunities to see themselves in many of the books they read - an act that works in very real ways to both affirm and celebrate their sense of self which, of course, is defined in a wide variety of ways by the social groups to which they belong (interests, attitudes, family structures, religion, race, ethnicity, etc).

Conducting research on the books in our classroom is something I've helped other classes to do in past years. What we've found in each instance is that we (I) need to work harder to constantly seek out stories that share the lives, stories, and experiences (both fictional and true) of a wide variety of people found across our community, country, and world. Yesterday I started this process of with our class. We started by simply going through our books and weeding out the ones no one is interested in reading. Each table group looked through a stack of books and voted on whether or not they felt anyone in class would want to read that particular book at any point this year or next. We found almost all of our books were high interest (only a handful were discarded). In January we'll take the remaining books and begin tallying who we see represented in each. Once we get our final counts, and determine where our holes are in our classroom literature, we'll begin putting together lists of books we'd like to purchase to supplement what we already have in an effort to create a richer and more inclusive classroom library. I told the kids my goal is to purchase $1000 in new books for them this year. To fund this, I plan to write a grant proposal for various organizations, ask for books from anyone giving me gifts this holiday season, and perhaps having our class host an after school club for younger children in the school where we would use any money earned to purchase books. We'll also be asking for your input as to any particular book titles you might be aware of that you feel should really be in our classroom library.

Transitioning from future work to current studies, we've been doing a whole lot lately with graphs. We've learned about and created bar graphs.

We've learned about and created line graphs.

We've learned about and created pictographs.

And we've learned about and created creative representations of data (we're calling these interactive graphs). You'll note the size of each picture is roughly proportional the number of people who voted for that option.

We're also launching daily number talks in math. Dr. Johnson's wife, Malisa, visited our faculty recently to share some amazing work she and others in her school have been doing with their kids in math. Poised to see what our kids can do when given this same opportunity, I adopted their structure into our own classroom. It's much like our previous "Number of the Day" with a few key changes that support kids to work more collaboratively and grow new understandings around (at times) complex concepts. Here's our first example of this work...

Lastly, please don't forget our second Curriculum Night is next Thursday. We'll be sharing the work we're doing in math right now. We'll begin with a math talk (such as the one represented by the pic above), talk about some things we've been learning, and then engage you in  work alongside us. I  hope you can make it!


Chris