Newsletter: January 10

Class-generated questions from one of our most recent read alouds, A Dance Like Starlights

I hope you all had a wonderful winter break and holiday season with your families. The kids returned with lots of great stories about trips, family visits, and - of course - gifts. I struggled a bit to come up with a story of my own to share. We mostly hung around home and relaxed. Not that this was so bad. It was exactly what we needed most.

This week has been one of my favorites of the year. We've accomplished a lot. In reading, we are currently in the midst of an inquiry into the sorts of thinking we do to support our comprehension. After "spying on ourselves as readers" before the break to name the different types of thinking that occur inside our heads - asking questions, making predictions, drawing connections, retelling, sharing our own beliefs/ideas about something, figuring things out, and sizing up the characters - we are now taking a closer look at each of these. This week we've focused on the act of questioning the text.

As evidenced in the photo at the top of this post, some of these questions are about words we don't know, others address parts of the story we're not sure makes sense to us, and a few of our questions are an attempt to better understand the world we live in. There's a lot of power in this work. Not only are we learning to better comprehend what we learn but we are also using picture books to turn a critical eye on hurtful laws, beliefs, and practices. A few of our favorite books have been:

Written by the Queen of Jordan, this book helped us think about the effects
of teasing others about the foods they bring in their lunchboxes - particularly
those that have cultural significance.

This text, detailing the fictional story of a young girl who dreams of becoming a ballerina,
led us to wonder why people would segregate public spaces as well as deny people
the freedom to pursue their dreams. 

This text, purchased for us by one of our classroom families, helped us consider the importance
of all people seeing themselves reflected in the artwork within museums - especially if museums
are supposed to be places that display those things that are "important" and "valuable." A few of
the kids in class began putting together plans for us to create our own museum featuring artifacts
that reflect who we are in all sorts of different ways. 

I'm so proud of how these kids are growing as readers - as well as justice-minded citizens.Today I shared some statistics with them, growing out of our discussions about museums, concerning representation in children's literature. We found that in 2017, of the 3,500 book published for children, approximately 2,600 of them told the stories of white characters while there were only around 300 about people who were Black, Asian-American, and Latinx. Only 44 were about characters who were Native American. We agreed this provided wonderful opportunities for white readers but we worried about what it meant for other readers who also want lots of stories that reflect different pieces of their own identities and lives.

Tomorrow I will share the graphic below (from 2015) and ask them how they think this happens and what we might do about it.

I also invited them to help me research the books in our own class library to see how well our books reflect the people in our school and in our classroom. While our numbers were considerably better than those in the study from the University of Wisconsin, there was still a whole lot of room for improvement. Ultimately, this is on me since I am the one purchasing the vast majority of our books. In the coming weeks and months I'll ask the kids to help me find new titles that can fill the many holes we found. I've also applied for a grant that I hope to receive before the end of the year. If so, I'll be able to invite each of you to select books you feel represent your child to add to our classroom library. This could be based on a wide variety of identities/factors - interests, family structure, personality, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, etc. The more books we can get on the shelves that both remind the kids of themselves and help them peek into the world of others the better!

In addition to tallying lots of books we've been hard at work with computation problems that involve larger numbers. We've begun with two-digit addition. The kids have been counting beans while grouping them into tens and hundreds. We've also used base-ten blocks to help us solve and better understand how multi-digit addition works. We'll continue at this work over the remainder of the year. We'll also begin subtracting multi-digit numbers as well, including those that require regrouping.

In science, we've launched an inquiry into weather. Each day we're observing and recording the sky conditions. We're also creating a class graph to track changes in the weather across days and months. Aspects of the weather we're paying particular attention to are temperature, wind, and precipitation. To measure the daily precipitation, we constructed rain gauges. The kids carefully measured out marks on stickers and stuck these to small containers we placed in our garden.

Measuring out our marks

Our finished product - a rain gauge!

That's it for this week. As always, thanks so much for all you do to support the kids and our classroom. Have a great weekend!

Chris