Monday, September 23, 2013

First Days of School

Hello Spirit Bear Families!
We are so excited to have your children back with us for another school year!  They are an incredible group of invested and enthusiastic learners!  They are excited and full of positive energy.   As a result, we have hit the ground running across the board in reading, math, science and social studies. We feel like we want to pinch ourselves when Ben says, "Please can we skip recess after the field trip and go work on our Mind Maps," and his classmates back him up with a resounding, "Yes!"

Our school-wide theme this year is "Making Connections."  We started making connections with each other right away, catching up with old friends and welcoming new ones into our community.  To help our kids connect with one another, the Spirit Bears participated in a variety of activities.  As a class we created actual string webs, tossing a ball of yarn from one friend to another.  We shared summer experiences, laughing about giant roller coaster rides and one upping each other with "the biggest wave" stories. All the kids were beaming and eager to connect their summer adventures to one another's. To connect with our table mates, each child creatively filled a puzzle piece highlighting their interests.  They then pieced the puzzle together, discovering and celebrating their similarities and differences.  According to Ania, "Though we may have different interests, we still fit together!" Finally, as a way to give the children  an opportunity to further connect, they worked in pairs on Venn Diagrams and partner portraits.




Partners interviewed each other, first generating then answering questions.  They then painted portraits of their partner.  It was delicious to see them, all sprawled out across our classroom, giggling, water coloring and listening to music.  It was gleefully obvious that strong connections were being made! Here's a preview, but check out all of the Venn Diagrams and partner portraits along the art hall of the main building!





In reading, the Spirit Bears have selected an independent book that they are excited about and connected to.  "Stop, spot and jot" has been a hit with the group! As they read, the children use sticky notes to jot down new vocabulary, interesting sentences or passages, and/or connections made to onesself, another text or to the world.  They then share their "jots" in small book group.  This gives the kids the opportunity to engage in a meaningful discussion about what they are reading.  It is such a thrill to listen to them compare plot lines and revel in beautiful descriptions.  We love watching them fall in love with words and connect to characters.  We continue to grow our vocabulary as a whole class by using context clues to understand the meaning of unfamiliar words and making words more memorable by acting them out or sharing specific experiences where the words are applicable.  They are such avid readers and their enthusiasm is infectious.  They continuously beg for more reading time and are wonderfully supportive of one another.  We often hear words of encouragement from one child to another.  We overheard Mikey during independent reading saying to a friend, "I can really tell you read ALOT over the summer.  You sound so good!"

To honor the season of summer, we kicked off writing with an "Ode to Summer."  We were inspired by the John Keats poem, "Ode to Autumn."  The children listened to the piece, eyes closed, letting the poet paint a picture with his words.  We discussed that sometimes when we read poetry, we may not be completely certain of the author's intention.  We learned that finding beautiful words and phrases that we connect to within the piece is inspiring.  The Spirit Bears revisited the writing process and used their own bank of summer adventures to create Odes to Summer.  We shared them in the author's chair, offering and receiving constructive criticism to make our work go from good to great! They shared their writing with zeal and confidence, cheering each other on and offering advice.  It is a joy to watch them stretch and grow as authors.  Brody inspired the class with his homework assignment when he described John Keats as "the Monet of writing."  We decided to create illustrations to go with our poems.  After learning about Claude Monet, the Spirit Bears painted impressionist style beaches, boats and sunsets.  We can't wait to share them with you this Wednesday at Back to School Night!


We've started our study of Social Studies reviewing the four ancient civilizations that we briefly studied towards the end of last school-year.  Our study of ancient Egypt, China, Greece and Rome includes understanding aspects of culture, including food, clothing, holidays and festivals.  The children also reviewed the geography of each country and are understanding how geography impacts daily life and culture.  We will continue our study of the four ancient civilizations, first comparing the governments of each, then investigating connections between ancient governments and our current US system. The children are incredibly engaged in this study.  They are barreling through web sites and books and researching with purpose.  They are effective, focused and energized.  The culminating project will be a Mind Map book and study guide.  Each child is using their research to create a page in our class book.  The page will feature simple illustrations coupled with writing.  It will serve as a springboard for our comparative government study.  Next week will examine architecture of Egypt, Greece and Rome, particularly focusing on pillars.  We are planning a field trip on October 3 to visit the Corcoran Gallery of Art.  Asa's aunt has an exhibit which perfectly connects to our study.  Washington, DC also serves as a wonderful architectural backdrop and demonstrates how much our world is and was impacted by ancient civilizations. 

Our theme of "Making Connections" continued into science.  We began the year by investigating quotes from famous scientists, such as Edwin Hubble and Albert Einstein.  The Spirit Bears worked together to interpret the meaning of the quotes.  We then followed up by making a giant web of what science means to them.   We are studying natural disasters.  The children examined photographs of natural disasters after watching a Brain Pop video.  They used their knowledge and inference skills to identify which natural disaster matched each photograph.  It was a challenging activity as many of the photos required scrutiny.  Next week we will research natural disasters that impacted ancient civilizations.  The Spirit Bears will also participate in some hands on experiments involving plate tectonics.


A review and deeper understanding of place value through the millions has been our focus in math.  Playing whole class math games has been a great way to get students' brains engaged in solving math problems.  The Spirit Bears are working in differentiated groups, according to their specific learning needs in math.  They are particularly excited about a dice game that involves building the biggest number into the millions.  Ask your child to play it with you at home.  It combines risk and higher level thinking skills.  Games such as "Guess My Number" require them to apply their understanding of number sense.  We are also re-visiting graphing.  We begin each math class by creating a question and gathering data.  We will be learning to build many different types of graphs.  Next week we will review adding and subtracting with re-grouping and borrowing into the millions.  We will then quickly move into multiplication and division.  Math is interactive and applicable to the real world in the Spirit Bear class.  Many of the children say it is their favorite time of the day!

The Spirit Bears have gelled together so well already. We are thrilled to be working with your children this school-year!  We are looking forward to making this the best year yet at CDS!