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The Shakespearean Sonnet
November 5, 2008
Hello all,
Important Reminder
Next week is conference week. I know that I’ve been sending notes home to some of you and playing phone tag with others, but if we haven’t set up a conference yet, please contact me ASAP and I’ll also be making some calls tonight as well.
Paper Airplane Testing
Just a reminder that we will be testing our paper airplanes in the gymnasium tomorrow beginning at 2:30. You’re welcome to join us for the excitement of the competition.
Congratulations!
Congrats to Team 3, The Chubby Chipmunks, for their victory in the team competition for last week! Each member of the team will participate in an upcoming Writer of the Week skit at Town Meeting.
Congrats to the class as well, for defeating
me in the class-wide competition last week. As a result of their win, the kids will also enjoy a leaf party outside, meaning that we’ll all be jumping around and playing in the leaves on the next day of good weather. Let’s hope for a sunny afternoon before all the leaves are gone!
Charlie Award winner!
Congratulations to Colton, the Charlie Award winner from last week. On Monday, I asked Ms. Knight, our art teacher, for the name of the student who exhibited the best effort in class, and without hesitation, she said Colton’s name. I hope that the kids put forth their best effort wherever they may be, including art class, and for Colton, this seems to be the case. Congrats, Colton, on a job well done!
Homework Update
As you may have heard, I will be hosting the first annual Shakespeare Circle Science Fair in January, so the science project that your kiddo will be working on for the next two months will be his or her science fair project. As a kid, I was a huge fan of science fairs and even made it to the Massachusetts state finals one year. I’m hoping to breed the same enthusiasm in the kids this year.
Unlike previous science projects, we’ll be working on this one step by step in class as well. This week your child was asked to generate a list of topics that he or she may be interested in studying. From this list of a dozen or so topics, your child will hone in on one and identify a question that he or she would like to study. From there a hypothesis will be formed and then the research and experimenting can begin.
The projects will be due on the first day after winter vacation, and we will conduct our science fair that week. During the day, students from other classes will be invited to visit our room and see our work, and then one evening that week, you will be invited to join us for a full display of all the projects.
I have also arranged for three independent judges (a physicist, an engineer and a medical doctor) to join us that night, and they will evaluate each project based upon a rubric that I will distribute to the kids soon and ultimately decide upon a first, second and third place winner.
The kids seem very enthusiastic about the prospect of a science fair and can’t wait to get started. I’m hoping to make this a very positive experience as it related to science, experimentation, competition, and self-directed work.
As always, please be sure that the project remains in the hands of your child. While your advice, guidance, and critique are always welcome, please allow your child to complete this project on his or her own. If necessary, we could always have an adult science fair as well for you overly enthusiastic parents!
Kiva.org
To piggyback on our Essay of the Month topic, I introduced the kids to Kiva.org this week, a website that gives us the opportunity to help people throughout the world. Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
Kiva is a person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.
From the Kiva website:
The people on Kiva's site are real individuals in need of funding - not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs' profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.
Last year my students earned nearly $250 selling poetry over the holidays to friends and family members, and we used this money to fund five projects around the world, from South America to Eastern Europe to Africa. Last year’s class made a concerted effort to lend to women and entrepreneurs with children, targeting these two groups based upon what the kids felt were the greatest needs. We currently have about $65 in our account and we’ll be looking to re-loan this money next week. It’s always exciting for the kids to see their money change the life of a person somewhere in the world, and hopefully we can add to our bank later this year during our own poetry sale.
Curriculum Update
A couple quick items in terms of curriculum:
WRITING
This week we’ve been talking about carving out a space in the home for writing, and I’ve been showing the kids photos of the writing spaces of some of America’s best known authors. I’ve invited the kids to take photos of their own writing space at home and either print these photos out or email them to me to show the class.
MATH
In addition to continuing our study of multiplication, we’ve spent this week learning more about measurement (a topic that belongs in the science curriculum, but that’s an argument for another day!), including the conversion of metric and standard measurements. The kids will need to know how many inches in a foot, feet in a mile, millimeters in a meter, etc. So I’ve informed them that they should be studying these measurements at home and should be ready for a test on this subject next week. Please help your kiddo out by quizzing him or her on this information whenever possible.
Thanks! Have a great day!