Jan. 23, 2011

Dear Parents and Families,

First of all, I’d like to officially welcome Diego Ortiz (and his mom, Karleigh,) to our class. Diego started two weeks ago, and he’s a great kid.
Science: we’re in our second week of our Solids, Liquids, and Gases workshops. We’re studying the states of matter. Talk to your child about what he or she learned this week.

Reading: we administered half of the mid-year reading assessments this week.

At-home reading – Please email me:
By now, at the half-point in the year, our 20 first and second graders are all making good strides as evidenced by this week’s assessments. Students at this age are all in different places though, in terms of their interest in reading and in terms of their organizational abilities (getting books home and back again). Some students have latched on to books avidly, and they need no prodding to choose topics they like and books that are just the right difficulty for them (getting no more than five words wrong on a page). Others are reading mostly because we make them. They less enthusiastically, and they are bringing home books that are too hard or too easy. Their heads really aren’t in it. If you’re finding your child is more in this latter category, please shoot me a quick email:

- How is at-home reading going for you? Thumbs up or thumbs down?
- Does your child need more help from me to find “just-right” books to bring home each week?
- Does your child need more help in finding books that will interest him/her?
- From what you are seeing at home, what kinds of books is your child getting excited about?
- Would you like to have phone conversation with me to brainstorm ideas for getting your child more into reading?
- Anything else?

Our Weekly Book Bags – changing things up:
As you recall, I began the year with having all students choose five books from our class library each Monday to read in class. I also had them choosing two books at a time to bring back and forth to home in a plastic Book Bag. The change: no more plastic bag. It gets crunched up and lost in book bags and cubbies, so now we’ll be using a laminated Reading Folder that will go back and forth in your child’s back pack. The more-beginning readers, several times per week, will bring home their shorter books to read to you -- the books they have just read in their book group. Reading to you is a way to get more fluent now with the new words and grammar they have just learned. The farther-along readers, the readers who are into short chapter books and beyond, will come home more like one time per week with a couple of books from the class library or the school library.

A check-out sheet: to help the kids (and us adults) keep track of books going back and forth, I have taped a “check-out” sheet to the Reading Folder, so your child can more easily keep track of books they have taken out, and there will be a space for you and for me to make comments about the reading.

Our Reading Treasure Chest – looking for donations! Do you have any little toys or trinkets or stuffed-animals under foot that your child has outgrown? Would you consider donating them to our Reading Treasure Chest? My own kids are now in fifth and seventh grade, and I am down to their last matchbox cars and silly putties. If you’d like to donate, please seal them up in a plastic or paper bag and send them in. Thanks.

A thought about the difficult events in Tucson and Mount Mansfield Union High School: students have not brought up, nor have we discussed in class here any of these sad events. We teachers received a very-smart set of talking points we could use with a child if we are asked. If your child has asked you about any of these events and you’d like me to send along this advice sheet, just contact me.
I feel over and over again how lucky we are that our six and seven and eight-year-olds here in Williston, day after day, have, compared with their counterparts in other places all over the world, remarkably-safe lives – physically, emotionally, and psychologically. We are so lucky, because even in Norman-Rockwellesque Williston, our kids’ brains are filled up each day with the very-real-to-them struggles of handing in reading log in, telling the truth, being on time, getting noticed, belonging, being liked, trying to like someone they don’t like, trying to do things they think they’re not good at, and trying to find a way to do those things they love to do in the blur of get-on-the-bus-get-off-the-bus-get-ready-for-practice-get-in-the-car-we’re-going-shopping -- So even here, our kids have a full plate. We have a full plate.

But we have, in the ten years or so left of these kids’ childhoods, the opportunity every week and every day to just spend time with them, listen to them, think with them, look at them when they’re talking to us, struggle with them. Either we will do it or we won’t. But, we’ve got just a few hundred weeks’ worth, of little opportunities, to help our children find their own gift and really flourish as confident purposeful, strong, kind, self-reliant, imaginative, contributing, and content human beings – or not. The lesson I keep getting as I think of Tucson and Mount Mansfield, is that it’s so much in our hands, that it’s the little things, and that it is now.

Have a warm end of the weekend! - David