Post date: Oct 05, 2013 7:50:50 PM
Dear Parents,
My family and I just got back from a great day walking through the pumpkin fields of Half Moon Bay. Somehow, the onset of October has reminded me that the 10 months that I have with your kids does come and go quite quickly. Although I am confident that the curriculum, content and camaraderie are all coming along well, I do get a sense that there is unrealized potential for yet a greater purpose. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I do get a rare sense that this could and should be an extremely important and memorable year for them and all of us. I know that this is a heavy way to start the email, but I don’t want to let this year go by without mentioning often that I believe that this class has the potential to have a unique and powerful experience and lasting impact on the students, school, and community. If and how we capitalize on this elusive potential has yet to be determined.
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 parents helping out to make my job more effective and the experiences of the kids most beneficial. On each day, there was a parent present during the morning, helping the kids get engaged in the activities and stay up with the fast pace of class. During my prep times and lunch, other parent(s) 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.
More than anything, I want to make the most efficient and effective use of your (parents) time and talents, but I'm not exactly sure how to do that all the time. You've done this for longer than I have, and so I will be depending on you for guidance and feedback during the upcoming months. I'm thrilled that there will be a variety of adults in the room throughout each day and yet a bit humbled by the expertise that surrounds me and concerned that I might not be able to "put you to work" with as much direction as some of you requested in the survey form that you filled out before school started. I'll try to have plans and procedures in place that make the best use of your time, but please help me by assuming that you don't need any type of approval from me in order to infuse your strengths into the schedule of activities, lessons, classroom organization, appearance, and/or atmosphere. Although my instructional style is sporadically overly autocratic, I am hoping to create a class atmosphere that is conducive to shared leadership and the 'village' style of collaborative work between all of us -- students, parents, and teacher alike.
Science: Not much new in unit two, actually. We did a bit more work to understand the age of the Earth and the progression of the emergence of various forms of life. The kids used a "track" that I created to view a few websites and answer questions about the content of the page. They also read a few pages from a textbook and competed for highest scores on a jeopardy game covering the material. And lastly, some improved the work that they did last week on their timeline project.
Fall Science Experiments: Hopefully, during the week you received an email from your kid giving you access to their Google doc "Science Experiment Control Sheet" (blank sample here). This document will provide you and I with a way to be aware of their progress as they complete the many steps of their experiments. The kids should have the materials and procedures sections done by now. By next weekend they should deep into performing the experiments and collecting data by now (step 12 of the process). After that, the 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 (more on that later). I'd like to have this whole endeavor completed by the time we have parent conferences at the end of October.
Science Packets: My thanks to those of you that spent some time browsing the unit 1 packets that came home last Friday 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.
English: The kids should have finished up their Theme-Evidence essays this week. They also hosted the 4th graders in Ms Zare's class and together they used comic-creating software called Pixton to show the understanding of one of their vocabulary words. For this week's vocabulary, by the way, they had to ask people over forty to teach them their favorite words, which should be in their comp books by now. The highlight of the week, for me, was meeting the book club facilitators and watching them establish working relationships with the kids. There is abundant experience in this group and I am certain that we can be ambitious in our goals and deep in the discussions. The first piece of literature that they covered together is a short story called “Thank You Ma’am” by Langston Hughes. Here is a link to the story and here are the questions that the kids answered/created.
Social Studies: Almost everyone did their current events article although few actually had the paperwork asked for in the instructions. The discussions are fine, but I think I'll get back to holding them to the set standard. Speaking of which, I’m giving the students the responsibility of learning the basic content of the textbook chapters of each unit, and using class time for the experiences that do best in an interactive environments – discussions, explanations, videos, and debate. “Digesting” the material from the chapter may take a variety of forms, and we’re discussing and evaluating the options (note taking, diagrams, etc) during class. This past week the kids got into their "dig deeper into history" topics of their choice, which is something that they will do as a culmination of each unit.
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 is getting 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!
Walkabout Change: I hope that you have made it this far in my long newsletter, because there is a big change that will likely be made to the trip as a result of the closure on the Marin Headlands Hostel due to the Government shutdown. I've been in contact with the manager often and, although they can be ready for us within hours of official word of the shutdown ending, I think that it would be prudent and considerate of me to make the decision before the end of the weekend so that parents have advance notice of our return day and time. I will put details at the top of that walkabout page and send out another quick email tomorrow night about that. In short, if we did have to make it a one-night trip, we'd make the winter-spring SF trip into an SF & Headlands trip.