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The Shakespearean Sonnet
September 29, 2008
Hello all!
Back from Colebrook and back to business! I’m sure that you’ve heard a great deal about the trip, and I hope your little one came home feeling well. I managed to come down with a bit of a cold thanks to our time in the woods and spent the weekend recovering when I wasn’t stuck DJ’ing. I cannot tell you how proud we were of your kids. Both the Camp Jewell staff and the teachers were thoroughly impressed with their hard work, their willingness to endure the rain without complaint, and their outstanding behavior. It was one of the largest groups that we’ve ever taken to Colebrook, but it was also one of the easiest groups to manage. We all had a great deal of fun and hopefully your child learned a lot along the way!
Hopefully you received the note that your child was supposed to hide somewhere in the house for you to find while he or she was gone. If you didn’t, please ask your kiddo, as this was his or her secret homework from last week!
Family Dance Night!
Just a reminder that Thursday is Family Dance Night in the gym. Mrs. Szainburg always does a remarkable job with this evening and I hope to see you all there!
Congratulations!
Congrats to Team 2 for their back-to-back victory in the team competition for last week! They received a Steal a Job Pass, allowing them to steal the job of a classmate for a week, including the paycheck!
Congrats to the class as well, for defeating me in the class-wide competition. As a result of their win, they enjoyed 30 minutes of academic freedom in the classroom while I engaged in some miserable and boring paperwork. The kids were reading, writing, playing chess, playing math games, and memorizing poetry.
Student Representative Results
Congrats to Matthew, Laura, and Will, who emerged from our election today as our three Student Council Representatives. We know that they will handle this responsibility well.
I also wanted to mention the remarkable grace and dignity exhibited by Meghan, who lost the election in an exceptionally close race. It’s not easy to be the one candidate who didn’t win, but Meghan handled the situation better than many professional politicians. She accepted the bad news with a nod and a smile and was warmly embraced by her fellow candidates. As a teacher, it is awful to report these results to kids, knowing how much one student may be disappointed, but she made my job easy and demonstrated poise that would have made any parent proud.
Charlie Award winners!
Congratulations to Ryan, the Charlie Award winner from two weeks ago! I finished scoring our five paragraph essays from last week and Ryan’s was excellent. More impressive, Ryan sought out the opinions of me and his peers and worked exceptionally hard to ensure that his essay would be the very best that it could be. Congrats, Ryan, on a job very well done.
And even at Camp Jewell, I managed to choose a Charlie Award winner. I asked the Camp Jewell staff to identify the student who made the most progress during the three weeks at camp, and on Friday, they named Hector as the most improved camper. He went from a kid who wasn’t so sure about the environment to one who embraced the forest, nature, and all that it had to offer. Congratulations, Hector, on your Colebrook Charlie Award!
Mr. Dicks Writing Contest winner!
Congratulations to Riley, the first Mr. Dicks Writing Contest winner of the year! Riley wrote an excellent piece that suggested solutions to students who suffer from a fear of the dark. The judges found his advice both helpful and amusing. Congratulations, Riley, on a job well done.
The newest Mr. Dicks Writing Contest topic was announced today, and it had a deadline of Monday, giving interested entrants just a week to prepare their pieces. Good luck!
Homework
With just three days in the school week, I’ve assigned your child a couple simple homework assignments to go along with his or her Essay of the Month and Science Project of the Month. Both of these month-long assignments are due on Friday, and I have stressed to the children how high my expectations of the work are considering the amount of time that I have given them to complete these assignments. I’ve also sent home a reminder about the requirements for each assignment for your child to review before Friday.
The first is a reading assignment that is similar to a district-wide assessment that your child will be taking on Thursday. Your kiddo should be very familiar with this type of assessment (the DRP or Cloze assessment for those of you who are up on the lingo) and shouldn’t have difficulty with it. As always, I am looking for evidence that your child used strategies to answer the questions.
I also sent your child home with week 1 of the district’s HEART program, which promotes a healthy diet amongst our students. A letter attached to this newsletter explains what needs to be done during the first week of this five week unit.
Box Top Contest
The PTO is sponsoring a box top collection competition and the class with the most box tops by October 24 will receive a pizza party. This is a simple and effective fundraiser for our school every year and is free! If you could help us collect these Box ops for Education, we would appreciate it!
From time to time I will attempt to update you on some of the latest goings-on in terms of curriculum in the classroom. Here’s the first of many updates:
MATH
This unit begins with a brief study of the number of eyelets in students’ shoes.
This investigation introduces the TIMS Laboratory Method, a simplified version of the scientific method designed for children to use.
Students also conduct an
experiment
in which they study a small sample of
a larger population in order to make estimates about the population. Your
child will gather and organize data, find averages, make and read bar graphs,
and make and check predictions.
You can help your child with the work in this unit by:
Talking about the mathematics you use every day—the measuring you do when you cook or the computations you do when you pay the sitter.
Asking your child to explain the mathematics he or she is doing in school.
Reviewing addition, subtraction and multiplication facts with your child. If your child needs more practice, he or she will be given flash cards and games to use at home.
We have been working in this unit for the first month of school and will actually finish it up this week, so look for another update soon regarding newest unit.
READING
This morning your child received his or her first mentor text, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and in just the first five pages, we began an excellent discussion on character studies. Though many of the kids have read this book already, I explained to them that I was forced to read Moby Dick four times in my college career and managed to find new and interesting elements of the text each time. And within a page of our mentor text, that was proven to many kids. Also, we’re going to be reading and creating some graphic novels this year, and the cartoons that accompany the text of Diary of a Wimpy Kid serve as a great bridge to this genre.
We also discussed the actual format of Reader’s Workshop, one that many of you parent volunteers will be assisting with, and we discussed the ways in which some students manage to read 2-3 books at a time. Not an easy but not an impossible task either.
And of course, we continue our study of Shakespeare with our current read aloud, Hamlet. As the year progresses, the kids will find themselves reading Shakespeare as well, but for now, our study centers primarily on the study of the England of Shakespeare’s day and the play that I am reading aloud. The kids absolutely love the stories so far, and I find it impossible to satisfy their craving for the text.
In terms of actual reading skills, we spent the first month working on identifying main idea and supporting details, which has fit well into the introduction of the five-paragraph essay. We transitioned to the study of sequence this morning, the order in which things happen in fiction and non-fiction texts, but based upon the kids’ performance with main idea and supporting details, this is a topic that we will return to often.
To support this instruction at home, you can ask your child lots of questions about the material that he or she is reading during the day. Re-telling is an important component to comprehension, so opportunities to chat about a text can be remarkably beneficial to a student. I’ve attached a conversation guide to the newsletter that you can use at home to target specific reading strategies in these conversations. This guide was created by Mrs. Gorfain and me last year and was then thoroughly tested by parents in the classroom until they felt that it was easy enough for most people to use. You may find it helpful in getting your little one to start talking about the books that he or she is reading.
And of course, please ensure that your kiddo is reading every night, without exception. This is the most important thing that you could be doing.
As always, more to say but no time!
Warmly,