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Saturday, September 7, 2013

Lots and lots of presents!

Our week was full so many thoughtful and mature discussions about Hike for Hunger and food insecurity, reading resolutions, perseverance and homework!

Our classroom has already raised $320 for Hunger Free Vermont by simply talking to neighbors, friends and family about the important work that is being done to ensure that Vermonters, no matter their age, race and level of need, can get healthy and nutritious food.  We can't believe that some Vermonter's have to survive on $1.80 per meal!  Thank you for supporting your child and his or her enthusiasm in fundraising for this community event.  If your child will be hiking on September 28th at Catamount Family Center, please sign them up at Hunger Free Vermont (or use link at top of page). We know that not all students can participate in the walk, so we have decided to have a Food Drive through September 27th.  On this day, we hope to bring at least 100 non perishable food items to the Shelburne Food Shelf!  We are so excited about supporting our local community as well as the broader community that benefits from the resources and agencies that Hunger Free Vermont works with!

This week Endeavor 5th Grade received a lot of tools to aid them in the classroom.  During Readers Workshop we have been developing our routine, thinking and writing about our best reading memories, our worst reading memories and creating a list of ways that we can ensure that we will make reading the best that it can be this year!  Together our class is working hard to keep the classroom quiet, to ignore distractions by keeping our eyes and noses in our books, using reading logs to track how many pages we can read in a session and throughout at week, and lastly we each created a reading resolution that is hanging in the classroom.  Throughout the year we will be able to reflect back on our reading resolutions to see how they are coming along, if we have achieved them or what help we may need to make them come true!  The best part of readers workshop was receiving our new Reader's Notebooks! They are organized with tabs (sections), resources, graphic organizers, everything you could think of to aid us in our thinking and writing about books and reading!  We also got sticky notes and new pens!

Writers Workshop this week involved time to personalize our Writers Notebooks, an on demand narrative writing prompt (so i can see what these 5th graders know about the structure, development and conventions of a narrative) and some quick idea generating strategies that we got to try out in our notebooks!  Next week we will continue with these lessons as we being to develop our first writing project.

During Math this week we were busy working in partnerships to create displays of our class height data.  I was impressed by the variety of displays that students created.  We had bar graphs, line plots, and organized charts.  5th graders worked together to even find the mean, mode, median and average of our data!  We began Number Corner and have begun noticing patterns in our calendar, running 2 penny toss trials and collecting data and even finding time to do some mental math and problem solving.  Your mathematicians have come up with class agreements for math time (really for all parts of the day) like respecting one another's thinking, agreeing to disagree and to listen and encourage one another to share his or her ideas!

Lastly, goal sheets are coming hime today in your child's homework folder.  Please take the time to review this sheet with your child and work together to plan out the week and the time they will need to accomplish all of the assignments.  We went over the sheet and even mapped out the days for homework and pretended to assign certain items to certain days.  The purpose of this activity was to show kids how they need to plan their week and spread out their homework and manage their time so that it does not all pile up on the last night!  We will continue to do this activity on Fridays with our weekly goal sheet.  If you would like more information on Executive Functioning, visit http://cognitiveconnectionstherapy.com/

The executive functions are a set of processes that all have to do with managing oneself and one's resources in order to achieve a goal. It is an umbrella term for the neurologically-based skills involving mental control and self-regulation.

Cara and I have been trying out some organizational techniques from cognitive connection therapy, we and all CSSU teachers and staff were lucky enough to hear a presentation from Sarah Ward, the brains behind this research!

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