Post date: Mar 13, 2017 12:24:49 AM
What an amazing sunny and beautiful day it is today! Weeds and wisteria are sprouting all over our backyard, the apple trees are showing their first buds, and beach traffic is congesting highway 17 -- this all reminds me just how quickly summer is coming up on us!
In this newsletter:
1. Current events docs & discussion much improved.
For the 14 kids who turned in a current events sheet last week, much praise deserved! Their write-ups were much more in depth and, as far as I saw/heard, the discussions were much more up to par than in previous weeks. I really appreciate how they have responded to my raising-the-bar pep-talk on Monday.
2. Virtual tour of our classroom.
Wayman and Maya used Matterport's cool multi-lens rotating camera to scan our classroom on Thursday after school. Check out the this virtual tour of our classroom and play a round of "where's Maya?" I'm imagining that eventually this kind of thing will be very useful as the skin/interface for an interactive virtual classroom -- places around the room should be clickable and link to things like online curriculum and resources, a turn-in box, video conference screen, and suggestion box. Imagination leads to innovation, right?
3. Essay organizer.
Last weekend the kids had to come up with a (thesis?) statement regarding their chosen topic related to the Pay It Forward movie. This past week they should have used some kind of three-column essay organizer to put down evidence/details from the movie that can support their statement. If that document has been done well, the writing of the essay itself will be easier and allow them to focus on things like sentence fluency, word choice, and voice -- the elements that make essays more powerful, effective, and valuable!
4. Science Fair projects.
When I mentioned the upcoming science fair events (April 26 and May 26) to the class this week, there were more groans than cheers so I drilled into that a bit and heard concerns about the restrictions imposed and overdone writing components of previous years. So, I showed the kids the wide range of possibilities, lack of essay to turn in, and requirement (expectation) that they just do an activity from one of the two categories (experimental process OR engineering product) -- they were relieved and then ideas began to flow!
5. Branches of government posters, best ever!
Groups of 8 have invested three hours so far in researching about one of the three branches of government, creating a poster, and writing questions for our upcoming quiz. The posters are certainly the best that I've seen in the four years that I've taught this intensive. They have a good balance of design and content and show great effort, planning, and cooperative effort.
6. Class clutter = community donation.
As always, I battle the amount of stuff in the classroom and try to keep our small overfilled space organized and clutter-free. Much of the mess is mine, but some is the kids' stuff that they leave around after they've left the room. My latest tactic is a bit harsh and I have to be forthcoming about it: at the end of the day I'm putting stuff out onto the ramp and railing. I'm talking about clothing, lunch containers, and water bottles. It isn't uncommon that some of the stuff is gone by the next morning, perhaps adopted by someone in the neighborhood, or (hopefully) retrieved by the kid. Each kid has a drawer and a plastic tray and a backpack in which to store stuff, but leaving it around the room shouldn't be a habit by now.
My best to you all.
Chris