We are all settling into our new classroom and are enjoying its newness. Thanks for all of you who helped move in--we couldn't have done it without you! As some of you know, we are spending this Friday morning exploring the geology of Chautauqua Park. Drop off is at 8:45 at the ranger cottage at the park and pick up is at 12:15 at 1816 Mariposa (home of the Weavers). IMPORTANT: Please let me know if you want me or Pam (Kea's mom) to give your child a ride back to school. Elections Yesterday we watched a few political advertisements and critiqued them. Were they positive, negative, neutral (meet the candidate in nature), biased, etc? As part of this week's homework, your child will ask you and other adults about their views and opinions of the political ads that you've heard or seen. We have finished registering many of the students in our school to prepare for the Horizons presidential election on November 6. Later this week, we will prepare the ballots and construct voting booths. We are part of a larger kids voting project: http://greatdaytolearn.com/kidvote/ Language Arts Today I launched our writing unit on the literary essay: writing about reading. In your child's personal narrative, many wrote about lessons they learned from people and/or experiences. But writing also helps us learn from characters in books we read. "Just as writing allows us to pause in our hurried lives and really notice and experience and reflect on things that have happened to us, so, too, writing allows us to pause in our hurried reading and pay attention to the characters in our books." (Lucy Calkins) In upcoming mini-lessons, I hope to have children experience the texts, dream the world of the story, walk in the shoes of the character. Reading actively and combining this with imagination and empathy will allow students to write inside the text and create engaging literary essays. Mathematics This week we are integrating our coverage of the elections into math. For the next week or so, we will examine data and interpret and construct bar, circle graphs, and scatter plots. On election day, we will tabulate the results from the school and create appropriate graphs to display the results. Some students are working on order of operations for homework. I've given them some problems that might be a stretch for them since we have not covered decimals and fractions yet. You may help them with this or have them check in with me if they have any questions. Science Your child started the third of four science rotations. They are with Lauren for the next 10 days learning about the sun, moon and the Earth. Art Tomorrow, Kara will be working with the kids on self portraits. Comments are closed.
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