Post date: Oct 06, 2012 5:54:2 AM
Hi Parents and Students and Happy Friday.
Parent Work Shifts: The biggest event of the week was the onset of the parent work shifts. As I stated in my newsletter of last week, I was quite nervous about finding ways to best utilize the talents of parents in the classroom. But after spending a week together, those fears have completely gone away and I am so very excited for the year ahead. I am so lucky to have such a great set of 10 parents helping out to make the experiences of the kids most powerful. On each day, there was a parent present during the morning, helping all 3 classes get engaged in the activities and staying up with the fast pace of class. During my prep times and lunch each day, another parent helped out by scoring papers, entering data online, cleaning/organizing, and being a sounding board. How the rest of the world gets by in a teacher-only scenario is hard for me to imagine now -- we sure got it right in our little parent-involvement utopia that is DCS.
Selectives: The afternoons around school are busy and exciting for me, and hopefully the kids as well. The class offerings are interesting and another excellent feature unique to our school. My woodshop classes are off to a great start, Digital Life projects under way, and GPS group ready to hit the road! From the students I have heard good things about so many of the other classes, from cupcakes to digital photography! The "core" time has been spent with homerooms so far, and I hope that soon enough we will be able to let the kids shuffle it up a bit and work on various things in various configurations during A-block onTuesday and Fridays. Our "Interest-Based Mini-Courses" from the past two years have been a good way to combine the students areas of personal interest with curricular objectives and project management skills. More on that later, I hope.
Science Recap: On Monday I had the kids add interval times to their "Forty Meter Run" line graphs and then turn them in. Then, on Tuesday after the chapter 5 quiz, the kids played with some friction activities (online and actual). By Wednesday they moved on to gravity and motion by doing a quick activity dropping balls of different mass and then doing a "track" that presented various websites and asked questions. On Thursday, the kids used another home-made (over-simple) device to get some hands on experience with the relationship of centripetal & gravitational forces involved in orbits and, for homework, created a simple infographic from some text. Today (Friday) the kids started a new project -- making an online animations that teach about a word or concept in this unit. Despite a slow network and a bit of a learning curve, some kids have finished already (sample 1 and sample 2)
Packets: My thanks to those of you that spent some time browsing the unit 1 packets that came home on Tuesday and then returning them to school. Those packets are chapter one in the collection of organized work that the students will take with them to high school. Although the many assignments do not completely capture (or comprise) the learning attained, reviewing the packets together is one way of keeping the teacher-student-parent traid of communication and performance awareness open. There are about a half dozen students in each class that haven't returned packets yet and so I'll be writing home about that in a separate email.
Non-Fiction Form: Students should be engaging you in a conversation sometime this weekend, about some non-fiction article that they've read. A topic in current events and science would be my preference, but I leave the choice of topic up to the students.
Fall Science Experiments: The kids should be performing deep into experiments and collecting data by now (step 13 in the process). I've conferenced with many groups and am impressed by their progress. If your student cannot show you a "control sheet" document mostly filled in and followed (or preceeded) by a detailed procedure, then they are quite behind. Next steps will include data analysis and display as well as the formation of some conclusions and the publishing of their work on the science page of their online portfolio (scroll down a bit). I'd like to have this whole endeavor completed by the time we have parent conferences at the end of October.
Exploratorium: A week from today we will spend the whole day at the SF Exploratorium. The exhibits there have so much to offer in the area of science inquiry, exploration, and intrigue. I'll be writing to the parent chaperones and asking each to investigate a specific area in the hall in which they will play host, inviting students into various activities and guiding the inquiry process. The kids will have some simple form to complete while they visit some of the exhibits (results from previous years). We still need drivers, by the way, so if you can make it work at all, please let any of the FT Coordinators know and come join us for a great day!
Thanks for listening and making it this far in my Friday night ramblings.
Chris Heumann