Week of September 13th

It was nice to have a full week of school and to really get started with a focus on our curriculum, hopefully at least a few of the kids thought so too. We wrapped up our Second Step Bullying Unit with a lesson on cyber bullying. It's a shame that this even has to be addressed, but it is so rampant in our society and relevant to this age group that it is incumbent upon us as educators to teach the kids about it and to impress upon them the need for safe, on-line usage. Our next unit will be Empathy, and the kids will learn what it means and how to put yourself in someone else's shoes to see how they may feel or react in any given situation.

We began our math curriculum with a unit on place value and big numbers. The kids are expected to be able to identify a number in multiple ways, including standard form, written form, and expanded form. We are learning about place value and spent the lesson on Thursday learning how to compare any set of numbers. Next week we will study five and six digit addition and subtraction. There will be a unit test at the end of the week and then we will begin our first switch unit of the year, focusing on factors, multiples, multiplication, and division the following week.

I gave a pre-test for both reading and writing this week. I want to see where the kids came in but I also want the kids to be able to see for themselves the substantial growth that will take place between the beginning of a unit and the end of a unit. That, in itself, has the potential to be very powerful to a young learner. Our reading unit is focused on character development and I am reading the book Tiger Rising as the anchor text for this unit. We will begin flushing out our own characters to use within our writing as we tackle a realistic fiction story in our first writing unit.

The class was all abuzz with our first science lessons. After devoting a discussion to what we know about land and water interacting, and what we want to learn about it, we performed our first experiment. We took varying amounts of humus, clay, gravel, and sand and mixed them together to prepare our soil. We then added a 'lake' of warm water in front of the soil, covered the stream table with plastic wrap, placed an ice pack on top of the wrap, and observed what happened as we attempted to replicate the water cycle. I also exposed the kids to several different modalities in which to learn the water cycle (through readings, video, and acting).

We had a couple of special activities this week as well. On Wednesday we commemorated Patriot's Day. I read a beautifully written and illustrated book entitled September Roses about two ladies from South Africa who were stranded in NYC with thousands of their roses as the floral show they came to attend was cancelled. Instead, they created a memorial to the victims with their roses and were cared for by complete strangers. We also watched an age appropriate video on 9/11 with the Meneese's and had a brief, but compelling conversation after the video. The message to the kids throughout the day was ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We ended our week with a lesson with Mrs. Skutch, our DST. She and I co-taught a lesson about differentiation and the term 'fair'. It turned into a very interesting discussion about what fair means and if fair was the same for everybody.

We will wrap up our first round of MAP testing on Monday with math. Once again there really isn't anything to do to prepare for this other than a good night's sleep, a healthy breakfast, and a timely arrival to school. I hope you all enjoy your weekend.