What a joy to meet and see all of your wonderful children this past week! I hope the first few days have been positive for each of them as we all reacquaint ourselves with the rhythm of school.
We have started to build community in our newly formed homerooms, welcoming fifth graders as well as students new to Horizons. This is important work that may feel familiar to 6th graders. It has been inspiring to see our sixth graders already rising to take on a greater leadership position in this process. We are all settling into our new surroundings and making new connections with old friends and new ones. One of our first activities was acknowledging that we all have worries or hesitations around transitions. We drew mind maps about why we worry and discussed consequences of worrying (and obsessive worrying). Of course, we could not leave it there and we as well as strategies to step out of worry and write them down and discuss them. This evolved into a piece titled the Worry Brain. As important as this was, we felt that we also needed a space to express our hopes and intentions for the year -- Hopeful Hearts. Please stop by the classroom and view the gallery above the cubbies. On Friday we had our first council together. The prompt was to share reflection from the worry brain and hopeful heart and let the class know something about yourself that might help them (and me) understand them better and what them know how they can support you with this. What was shared was truly touching, open, courageous. This post contains a few timely pieces of information as we head into our first full week together. Thank you in advance for reading on and letting me know if you have any questions or need additional information. Outdoor Ed Paperwork due Friday Thank you in advance for reading through this paperwork carefully and returning it no later than Friday 8/26. There are many forms to complete. If you would like to be considered for one of our 10 parent volunteer positions, please submit the volunteer page by Thursday August 25th. We hope to make a decision on our 10 parent volunteers at our team meeting that afternoon. Calvins! You may have heard from your child about the math activity they started this week using ratios and proportions. Watch for these posters to grace the halls in the next few days. Planners and Homework There is homework due Friday related to our study of ratios. We spent time today setting up our planners and understanding that we can use it to organize our weeks as well as use it as a reference. Your child should have "Ratio Homework Due" written in on Friday. Please see the calendar on the language arts tab for upcoming homework. Writer's Workshop We set up our writer's workshop this week beginning with each child sharing the photos they brought in. The main focus earlier in the week was on effective storytelling and careful listening. Each child has a partner and together they will work together to create a booklet titled "Inside/Outside"-- all stories have an outside and inside. Following this sharing, we participated in a series of mini-lessons and activities about the art of writing captions. So far we've explored using prepositional phrases and participial phrases to begin captions. More to come... Art and Computer Classes begin this week AND Math, Spanish, Social Studies and Science classes will begin on Monday 8/29 This will allow us an opportunity to make sure math placements are most appropriate as we observe students working on their Calvin projects as well as math screeners this week. Let me know if you would like to look at this assessment. Until then we will be working most frequently in our homeroom groups, however this week we will also begin computer and art classes. Maria, our new Spanish teacher, stopped by today to meet the children. Bi-weekly updates to the 5/6 webpage coming... In the next two weeks, we will begin to update our 5/6 webpage. We sit together as a team every other week and write the updates together in an effort to provide our 5/6 families with a more detailed understanding of the "how and why" of all things 5/6. Until then, look for emails like this from your child's homeroom teacher. Again, thank you for all that you have done to help create a smooth start to the school year - from helping last Saturday to sending in extra supplies. As always, please don't hesitate to email if you have a need for clarification. It's a joy to be learning with your children! Comments are closed.
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