We had an incredible first full week! We finally had Art class, we logged into Fastt Math, we had indoor recess, we logged onto out Kidblog pages and we had another Snack Shack! Your children also worked diligently on math and reading assessments this week! We will be prepping for NECAP next week as testing begins October 1st!
Our Wednesday Math class was challenging, yet every child persevered to understand the different strategies we can use to solve Cube Sequence Problems. We started the lesson by reminding ourselves that productive mathematicians make thoughtful observations about sequences, equations, patterns, etc., before they can do any work with a problem. By reinforcing this, we generalized about the sequence that we were working with. We knew that the pattern increased by 5 each time, we knew that the arms of the arrangements were one shorter than the sequence number and we knew that we need to account for the nested cube! We worked to solve problems to figure out the 16th arrangement, arrangement 21/2 and we even had to work backwards to figure out arrangement numbers when the total amount of cubes was given! As we shared our strategies, we saw that to solve these problems we could create a table, simply count the cubes, draw diagrams, and come up with our own algebraic formulas! Without our thoughtful mathematical observations, none of these strategies would have worked! During our discussion students took the time to practice many habits of mind and interaction. I was witness to students explaining their thinking, revoicing other student thinking, finding and using multiple pathways to solve problems, and justifying and generalizing about their thinking. These habits are integrated into our teaching, all day long. The hope is that they become internalized and that students are more successful because they are interacting with the content as well as one another to deepen their understanding!
On Thursday, our class logged into our Kidblog site! Every child was able to write a post titled "All About Me" and practiced leaving comments for one another. The activity that this Kidblog has generated at home has been tremendous. I can barely keep up with moderating the comments. I will be posting prompts for students to respond to, or at times we may record a reflection about our learning, or we may simply do some creative writing. This blog gives us an authentic audience to share our work with. Soon, I will be asking you to log into to our blog and leave comments for your child as well as others students about their writing. My three rules for this are Be Responsible, Be Safe and Be Kind! Ask your child to share our Kidblog with you!
Lastly, we shared our timelines in a museum format on Friday! Endeavor students asked such thoughtful questions of one another, shared thoughtful comments about student work and learned about so many connections we have with one another from our lives! A few of us were born in China, some of us have visited Italy and France, we play a lot of the same sports, we've been to Jay Peak, had special birthdays and all of us cherish members of our family! These timelines will be on display in the kiva! The kiva is truly becoming a place where every student and adult on our team is recognized and celebrated! We are all part of our community!
Many, many things came home in your child's Homework Folder. Please go over its content with them. We still need 1 more chaperone for Shelburne Farms! We need nonperishable food items for our Food Drive! If you plan to hike, don't forget to sign your child up for Hike for Hunger on September 28th! We sent home our sharing schedule for September, 2 children a day will share a Turning Point from their lives! Happy Fall!
Sunday, September 15, 2013
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!
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!
Friday, August 30, 2013
Successful First Week!
Dear Families and Students,
Endeavor 5th Grade has had an incredible first 3 days of school! Together we have begun to unpack our daily schedule, taken the time to get to know each other, manage the cafeteria, welcome new friends to the team, meet some new teachers who will be joining us in our classroom, sign up for chorus and band and maybe even the SCS Spelling Team! Every little part of our day is leading to establishing our sense of community and belonging with one another. We still need to sign up for classroom jobs, move our room around so everyone can fit (5th graders are so much bigger than Kindergarteners, (my mind is adjusting;), enjoy favorite picture books and figure out Fastt Math. Together we will get it all done and soon we will forget all it took to get things going!
Throughout these 3 days we have been establishing expectations for behavior and for the ways in which we will interact and with each other. We have started a list of words that we hope we can use to describe our classroom and that we hope that you as parents would use to describe our classroom community! Thanks to Mr. Lewis in PE and Mrs. Southworth in Music, some of the words are Support, Encourage, 100%, Safe, Teamwork, Kindness, Polite, Listen and Share! The discussion of the meanings of these words and the actions that go with them have been so mature! We plan to post these words in our classroom so that we can remind ourselves of what we expect of one another so that valuable learning can happen all day, everyday. I feel that we are off to a great start!
Team Time has been the most exciting this week! Together with Mrs. Crowther's class we have been working on a name poster project! Each student has created a name poster with their name in the center and special symbols in each corner of the paper telling us about themselves. These colorful and well planned pieces of work will line the kiva walls so that it is apparent to all, that bright, sophisticated, creative and caring students fill our kiva space! Today we also had our very first Snack Shack! Both classes came together to munch and crunch while reading our digital version of Scholastic News! We listened to a bit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and learned about the importance of this speech and its impact even 50 years later! We discussed important vocabulary words like segregation, discrimination and equal rights!
If you would like to enjoy this article, go to Scholastic News!
Enjoy this 3 day weekend! Again, thank you for sharing your children with me and having them rested and prepared for each day of learning! I look forward to next week as we talk about our Hopes and Dreams, begin Number Corner and continue to get to know one another!
Endeavor 5th Grade has had an incredible first 3 days of school! Together we have begun to unpack our daily schedule, taken the time to get to know each other, manage the cafeteria, welcome new friends to the team, meet some new teachers who will be joining us in our classroom, sign up for chorus and band and maybe even the SCS Spelling Team! Every little part of our day is leading to establishing our sense of community and belonging with one another. We still need to sign up for classroom jobs, move our room around so everyone can fit (5th graders are so much bigger than Kindergarteners, (my mind is adjusting;), enjoy favorite picture books and figure out Fastt Math. Together we will get it all done and soon we will forget all it took to get things going!
Throughout these 3 days we have been establishing expectations for behavior and for the ways in which we will interact and with each other. We have started a list of words that we hope we can use to describe our classroom and that we hope that you as parents would use to describe our classroom community! Thanks to Mr. Lewis in PE and Mrs. Southworth in Music, some of the words are Support, Encourage, 100%, Safe, Teamwork, Kindness, Polite, Listen and Share! The discussion of the meanings of these words and the actions that go with them have been so mature! We plan to post these words in our classroom so that we can remind ourselves of what we expect of one another so that valuable learning can happen all day, everyday. I feel that we are off to a great start!
Team Time has been the most exciting this week! Together with Mrs. Crowther's class we have been working on a name poster project! Each student has created a name poster with their name in the center and special symbols in each corner of the paper telling us about themselves. These colorful and well planned pieces of work will line the kiva walls so that it is apparent to all, that bright, sophisticated, creative and caring students fill our kiva space! Today we also had our very first Snack Shack! Both classes came together to munch and crunch while reading our digital version of Scholastic News! We listened to a bit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and learned about the importance of this speech and its impact even 50 years later! We discussed important vocabulary words like segregation, discrimination and equal rights!If you would like to enjoy this article, go to Scholastic News!
Enjoy this 3 day weekend! Again, thank you for sharing your children with me and having them rested and prepared for each day of learning! I look forward to next week as we talk about our Hopes and Dreams, begin Number Corner and continue to get to know one another!
Monday, August 26, 2013
Open House and Conferences
Dear Families and Students,
Thank you all so much for coming to conference with me last week and for visiting the classroom today during Open House! It was so exciting to see you in our classroom, taking in the setup and the environment and helping me get to know you a little! I am so looking forward to Wednesday as we start our endeavor together!
~Vasanthi
Thank you all so much for coming to conference with me last week and for visiting the classroom today during Open House! It was so exciting to see you in our classroom, taking in the setup and the environment and helping me get to know you a little! I am so looking forward to Wednesday as we start our endeavor together!
~Vasanthi
Monday, August 5, 2013
Walk Two Moons
I hope you all got my postcard from Maine! This week I am in a Blogging class at Allen Brook School in Williston. I am going to be setting up kidblogs for each of you! We will be doing a lot of blogging next year! I can't wait!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)