September 29, 2011

Good Morning!


This is baby Rye. He is 5 months old. He is a good friend of mine and will be coming in periodically so that we can track his growth and development. So far, we have learned that he is 67cm long and has a head circumference of 44 cm. He cannot sit or crawl. He has just started eating solid food with baby cereal and bananas being his first choices. He makes some noises that are really cute. Rye can hold things in his hands but is not very good at putting that thing any place very accurately. We're excited to see how different he will be next month.


In math, we are doing some really interesting daily problems. I love seeing the students get excited about the answer. Here is yesterday's problem:





Four members of the Knott family (Albert, Gigi, Nita, and Mona) intended to cross a lake in a small rubber dinghy, but at the first try they discovered that the dinghy wouldn't carry anthing over 200 pounds. And that's what Albert weighed all by himself. The rest of the Knott family were considerably lighter. Gigi, for instance, weighed in at only 104 pounds. Nita's weight was even six pounds less, and all four together did not weigh more than 494 pounds. But that wasn't the only problem. Nita didn't know how to row. After considerable debate, they figured out a way to cross the lake safely. What was their solution?





We are also looking at multiples in math, including lowest common multiples.





We had our first session with our Reading Buddies. Students reflected afterwards on their previous experiences as Reading Buddies and how it felt to be younger with an older buddy.





Please stay tuned as we are likely going to be changing the date for tomorrow's Terry Fox run which will mean a new permission form.


We have been collecting Toonies for Terry. Megan has thrown down the gauntlet and offered up an enticing deal. If students are able to double the amount of fund collected so far, she will dress up as a hotdog and allow students the opportunity to buy tickets that will allow them to squirt her with ketchup and mustard. I'm sure many will "relish" this opportunity (sorry for the punny). So please send those toonies in! We are also still collecting pledges for our running in the morning. So far, I don't believe anyone from our class has collected any money.

So the votes are in. Only 15 people voted on our snack option. We will be assigning families each their own week. When it is your week, you will provide snack for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please remember that we are a nut free school and that some students have allergies to dairy in our class. I will get that schedule made soon. Thanks for your patience.

Monday, September 26

Hello All,


I hope you were able to get out and enjoy the fine weather this weekend. Here at school, we are happy to have Will back after he was away last week at the University. Welcome back Will.


In math, we efficiently collected and counted all of the pizza money for the school. Students were able to tally orders and communicated with homerooms about the pizza orders in a kind and orderly fashion. Yay us!


We had a lockdown practice and all of the students sat silently until Megan came to release us.


Today I was able to model the letter writing assignment that I will have the students start soon. I wrote a letter to the class about the novel that we are reading as a read aloud.









When it comes time for them to write their letters, I will have more explicit guidlines for them to follow. I will also be altering the expectations for some students. I was pleased about the conversation that stemmed from my letter about the novel that we are reading. It is a great read so far.

Monday will be our library day. Most kids seem to be enjoying a novel right now which is great.

We are finishing some initial lessons in our Electricity unit. I hope to arrange for some more hands on investigations soon.

Will did a great lesson on disc skills in gym today. We were already able to see an improvement by the end of the lesson.

Please remember to send in toonies for Terry, your Terry Fox permission forms, pledge money for our morning run, and recipes.

It is also important to vote for our snack routine. I will be making a decision based on the results by the end of the week.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Thank you for coming out the class meeting on Wednesday. I really appreciate that you gave up an evening for that. I hope it was helpful.

This week in math, we have continued to look at Place Value. Most students are having no difficulty reading numbers up to the millions period. They are also writing and communicating clearly in their notebooks, and feeling challenged by our daily problem. I will likely start giving a word problem out for homework within the next few weeks.

In our Procedural Writing unit, I had the students work in groups to write instructions on how to play a gym game. They had the option of making up a new game or writing about one they've played before. Today we played Jaxsen, Tristan, and Julian's game called Jump For the Flag. It was a great game and is a definite keeper. Their instructions were well written and easy to understand too. Ask about the rules at home!

Here is the routine we looked at in dance today. We spoke about the story which Joey was able to pick up on even before hearing the choreographer talk about it. We also talked about how this dance was different from the first two which were both hip hop. The students picked up on some very interesting points such as the synchronicity of hip hop versus the more oranic and dramatic modern dance.

We took on the ambitious task of reorganizing our entire library. We emptied all of the shelves and categorized them as dictated by the students. Now we all have a more clear idea of what we have and what we need. Students were excited to find some books that they have added to their "must read" lists.

Our Chuck Close arts pieces are almost all done. Chuck Close was know for his photorealism. We think these turned out great and we are very proud.

Our reading of Thank You Mr. Falker went over very well. We've made some thick connections to real life. If you have not read this book, I highly suggest grabbing a box of tissues and checking it out.

Please check out yesterday's post about snack ideas and vote on which snack format you'd like to follow. Have a great weekend!

We are still collecting for:

recipes

Terry Fox permission forms and pledges

Famine pledges

Toonies for Terry

Scholastic

Snack Ideas

Hello! This is a post about yummy snack ideas for our group snack. We love to eat in Room 310. We especially love healthy, tidy, dairy-free, scrumptios snacks. Here are some of our favourites:

Bagels and Cream Cheese along with another dairy free option like jam or Tofutti
Vegetables with Hummus or Babaganoush
Pita and Hummus
Fruit like grapes, fruit kebabs, orange slices, apples, watermelon, melon
pineapple
Crackers with cheese served with something else dairy free like fruit or veggies
Bread or Buns
Muffins
Banana Bread
Nut-free Granola Bars

This is our list for now because it is 2:25. We'll post some more ideas soon.

Hello

Hi. I'm sorry I haven't gotten into the routine of updating here more often. Just trying to get settled in Room 310 first.

Our morning runs have proven to be a great start to the day. The kids are coming in on time and ready to learn. I hope to continue this trend.

If you have forgotten to return any forms that need to be returned to school, please take a minute to fill them out and return them to school. If you have already done so, or sent them in with a sibling, please jot down a quick note in the agenda to let me know.

Some forms missing are listed below:

●Student Verification Form (white)

●Supply Fees

●Permission Forms (pink)

●Churchill Family Directory / Parent Involvement Form (pink)

●Photo/Computer Form (pink)

●Permission Form for Morning Run (white)

We as a school are trying to get creative to raise funds for our many endeavours. We are most excited for Churchill Cooks Recipe Book. Please pass on any of your favourite family recipes to Megan at megan.egerton@ocdsb.ca. We need many more recipes to make this fundraise successful.

We are working on many great things in Room 310. I'm trying to stay hush hush so that you can see for yourself during our Class Meeting next Wednesday at 7:00. Please come out as we will be discussing a lot of important information.

Please continue to sign agendas each evening after students have written down their evening reading in it. This is an important routine in our room.

Thank you for all of the warm welcomes and friendly faces during this great beginning. I'm looking forward to a very productive and fun year.

Important Upcoming Dates:

Wednesday, September 21, 7:00pm: Class Meeting

Thursday, September 22, 5:00: School BBQ

Wednesday, September 28: Terry Fox Run

Friday, September 30: Movie Night

Welcome to Reading in 310

Dear Families:

This post will be dedicated to reading in our classroom. In room 310, a love and respect for reading is a big priority. A lot of time is spent on developing a community of readers who engage in the reading process actively and who learn to cherish their time as readers.

The Fall will be spent assessing students individually and giving them the chance to get to know themselves as readers. A reading survey will be conducted one one one with each student and will allow myself and each student to reflect on how they feel about reading. We will also spend time in the fall as a group reorganizing all of the books in our room and sharing with each other about books that we love. Students will learn how to choose a book, why we may abandon books, and we will review some of the strategies that good readers use to construct meaning from what they are reading.

I will gradually guide the students on how to respond meaningfully to what they are reading in order to communicate the meaning they garner from their independent reading. This will be in the form of a letter to myself. Eventually, our independent reading program will look like this:

• 30 minutes of independent reading every day
• students will use this time to read or write a letter to me
• students will be expected to write one letter to me each week
• letters will reflect an understanding of what they are reading in the form of connections, predictions, and questions; they will also include any answers to questions I have asked them
• I will respond to each letter in writing, forming a correspondence
• I will spend the 30 minutes each day meeting one on one with students or with small groups of students, focusing on reading strategies that target issues that arise in class or from their correspondence with me

As well as independent reading, we will also share many books together as a class and learn how to construct meaning, dialogue meaningfully with each other, and learn from one another as we respond to what we read as a class.

Assessment will take place in several forms.

• individual reading surveys conducted at the beginning and end of the year
• reading assessments conducted at several times throughout the year for fluency and comprehension
• CASI reading assessment conducted twice throughout the year
• continual assessment throughout the learning process that will guide our programming
• individual back and forth correspondence with students via their reading response letters
• one on one conferencing with students and small group work
• in class work

If you are interested, here is a link to the curriculum documents where you can read about the overall and specific reading expectations in grade 6. You may also find this document very helpful. It outlines a lot of key issues that define junior literacy students.

At Home Help

• Summarize and explain important ideas and supporting details from a text
• Read any text with your child and help them to pick out three important details from it.
• Use their prior knowledge and experiences together with clues from the text to develop their own interpretation about a text
• Read any text with your child and ask them "What is the story between the lines? How did you come to that conclusion?"
• Make connections to the text
• Read any text with your child and ask them to make connections. Types of connections:Text-to-Self (connect it to their own personal experiences), Text-to-Text (connect it to another book, movie, TV show etc.), Text-to-World (connect it to current or past world events)
• Make judgements and draw conclusions about a text and use proof from the text to support their answer
• Read any text with your child and ask them what conclusions they can make from the information given in the text
• Identify the point of view presented in the text, decide if they can agree with it or not and suggest other points of view that may be missing in the text
• Read any text with your child and ask them "Who is telling this story? Whose voice is missing from the text? Do you agree or disagree with the opinions of the author?"

Some other ideas to assist your child

• Read to them daily and have them read to you
• Exchange letters
• Read cereal boxes, video game manuals, grocery lists, recipes, newspapers, comics etc., with them, whatever they are interested in!

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Second day in and I'm happy to report that the students are still stunned into silence. Maybe it's from a lack of sleep, maybe they are stunned by my utter brilliance, or maybe they are just that great at being exceptional students. Either way, they have proven to be hard working and quiet so far. I'm crossing my fingers that it lasts.

We have accomplished a lot in these first two days. Students have already completed a time capsule by answering some interest questions, taking some measurements, and writing themselves a note. We are going to lock this up and open it at the end of the year.

As a class, we have also taken a look at twitter. We learned about how to tweet and why people tweet. We even made our own handles, avatars, and tweeted about our first day at school. Today, we read some very short stories that people have tweeted. We practiced our skills in visualization as we listened to these short tales. It was interesting to "see" the different ways that people visualized the stories.

Today we began to create our classroom goals. I presented the students with seven questions:

What should kids in our class be doing to make sure our classroom runs as smooth as possible?

Our classroom should be ______ everyday.

School is important because ___________.

What is one of your overall goals for this year in sixth grade?

What will you need to do to achieve that goal?

Write one goal you have for yourself after you graduate high school.

What will you need to do to achieve that goal?

They wrote their answers on sticky notes and added them to the posters. Tomorrow, we will look for trends in our answers and use these to guide us in creating our class goals which we will refer to all year to keep us on track.

If you have not handed in your parent questionnaires yet, please do so. Thank you.