October 19, 2010

October 19, 2010

Dear Parents and Families,

We have been writing up a storm this week. Today, we talked about how a story can be as simple as you telling about something funny you saw; it could be something you notice that someone has said. You decide to tell someone what you heard. That’s a story.

When you open your eyes and notice the cool things that are happening around you --- your story practically writes itself. I had kept a journal on the amazing things that came out of my kids’ mouths when they were young. I ended up typing it up, and I have been reading from it this week. I have been pleased to see that the kids have gotten excited: “I’ve got a story!” cried Jagger this morning. “Can I tell it?” And when he told it, it was a great story. “Write it down!” we all said, and by the end of writing time, Jagger had written four stories. Many others followed suit – telling their stories and then sitting down to purposefully write them. We also focused on using “talking marks” (quotes) and writing what people say to give the story energy.

In the coming days, I would like to begin a home-school journal wherein your child writes to you from school, and then your homework is to read it and write back. More on this next week.

In Reading, we are working in reading groups (“guided reading”). Here is where I challenge students with books with more challenging text and more unpredictable storylines. Meanwhile, other students are reading books at their desks independently (books that are “just right” for them; they can read them comfortably on their own.) And of course, there is the at-home reading. Your child should have come home with this week’s reading log. Please fill it out and return it on Monday.

Your child’s reading level:

I am going to need a few more days to email your child’s assessed reading level to all of you. It’s been a surprisingly-busy week. In the meantime, I have let your child know what book level (by letter) I think is a good one for him or her (each book should have a letter written in the top right-hand corner – the letters go from A to Z and are roughly associated with grade-level from K to grades 7 and 8). You can look at the books your child is bringing home to get a quick look at his or her assessed independent reading level at the beginning of this year. Here is a chart that tells how the letter roughly correlates with grade-level (of course there are overlaps.)

A-C= Kindergarten
B-I = Grade One
H-M = Grade Two
L-P = grade Three
O-T = Grade Four
S-W = Grade Five
V-Y = Grade Six
X-Z = Grade Seven, Eight, and Above

Do you wonder if a certain book is the right independent level for your child? Look here before hitting Barnes and Noble. You can go on the Scholastic website to make sure you’re not overshooting or undershooting. Scholastic has a leveling database; if you type in the name of a book, then click on the book’s image, they’ll tell you the letter associated with the reading level. Fountas and Pinnell also has a database on their website (it’s excellent), but they charge you about $15.00 for 20 visits.

Here is how you access the Scholastic Database:
1. Google Scholastic Book Leveling
2. (There is no login necessary)
3. Go to the top where it says Shop by Grade and Search
4. In the Search window, type the name of the book you are leveling.
5. When the book image appears, click on it.
6. Find the Guided Reading Level on the left.
7. Jot that reading level in the top right-hand corner of our hard-copy book.

Good luck. This should be helpful.

Speaking of Scholastic, you should have received in your child’s folder an instruction sheet on how to order Scholastic books online. Let me know if you have any questions. It’s a smart way to order: no lost checks or order forms.

Timeliner: Today, your child also brought home a brief “Timeliner” project as part of our study of “Today and Long Ago.” Please fill this out over the break and return it on Monday, too. I have enclosed a sample of the final product in the Friday Folder. Thanks for helping.

Our Stone Soup Harvest Festival was a rousing success today. We ate delicious soup and bread, and we dosey-doed around the garden to some awesome fiddle music. Special thanks to Kim Van Buren for ladling out the soup for hungry mouths!

Take care, everyone.

David

October 8, 2010

October 8, 2010

Notes From the Week

(Some of this is a recap of notes I sent home on Monday and Wednesday.)

Monday:

We had a great field trip today to the Flynn. As you know, we've been studying Today and Long Ago. Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the Little House on the Prairie series, lived at the end of the 1800s and traveled west with her family to homestead. She wrote all about the pioneer life. The play we saw today had a simple set and only four characters: Ma, Pa, Mary (her older sister), and Laura.

Our class learned about how people 130 years ago traveled not by car but by wagons and horses. They learned that many families grew and raised all the food they ate. They learned that especially if you lived in "the country" you might not even be able to see anyone else's house from your front doorstep, so you mostly played with your brothers and sisters. They learned that it took Laura and her family 3 months to travel from Wisconsin to Kansas by horse and wagon. They learned about homesteading, the threat of wild animals, and the threat of locusts. They learned that Laura became a writer by keeping a journal and by learning to describe for her blind sister, Mary, the many sights she saw.

Another thing we saw was the excitement -- a mixture of hope and fear -- that the Ingalls family-- and many other pioneer families felt whenever they headed off into unknown lands looking for land and work. Pa kept saying, "C'mon Ingalls Family! We got places to go!" He also was famous for saying, "THAT'S the pioneering spirit!" Another thing he said was, "When something bad happens, something good always comes of it."


Tuesday:

For writing, we talked about how sights and smells remind you of things that have happened to you. We took a walk up on the hill behind the classroom. We got very quiet and we felt the sun on our faces. We smelled the damp grass. We heard the rattle of leaves falling through the branches of trees. We went around and shared any stories we had about things we like to do with our families in the fall. We also picked grass and wrapped it with rubber bands to make sheaves of wheat. We’re letting them dry. Then, we’re going to use them to create a fall scene in our classroom.

Wednesday:

We took a walk down the hall and put sticky notes on paintings of fall that we liked. We talked about what we noticed. We planned our own paintings. Then, we returned to the classroom, read a story about Fall, and we each did rough drafts of a personal Fall scene that we’ll be painting and then writing about. We also read from James and the Giant Peach and we noticed how when James climbed into that peach, escaping his miserable aunts and his bare-wood bed, he must have been scared. We talked about how nice it was for him that Spider wove a comfortable hammock-bed for him, and Grasshopper and Glowworm said kind words to him, and…

“Already he was beginning to like his new friends very much. They were not nearly as terrible as they looked. In fact, they weren’t really terrible at all. They seemed extremely kind and helpful in spite of all the shouting and arguing that went on between them. ‘Good night, old green grasshopper,’ he whispered…”

We talked about how, just like James, our class is embarking on an adventure together this year – our classroom is our peach. And if we can all try to be thoughtful and kind and caring to each other, and apologize if we hurt someone, we, like James, will like our new friends very much, and they will like us very much, and we will end up having, together, accomplished very much.

Thursday:

Thank you to Hannaford Supermarkets for sponsoring an exciting, zany, energetic, emmy-award-winning producton called Foodplay. The two main characters were a coach and a student. They did juggling and dancing and prank-playing, and they did an excellent job of teaching kids to

1) eat five fruits or veggies per day (scary, isn’t it, parents?),
2) read the ingredients on the packages (and notice what the first ingredient is because that’s the biggest ingredient) and
3) Look out for high fructose corn syrup ‘cause it’s pretty-much just sugar.

Friday:

We began the day with a Morning Meeting sing-along. We couldn’t help it. “Cutter, Cutter, bo-butter, banana fanna fo-futter, fee-fi mo-mutter…. In Math, both first and second graders are deepening their understanding of patterns. With a new month, we have a new, emerging pattern to figure out in our Number Corner. In Reading, we are practicing picking books that are just right for us using the five-finger rule (as you read, every time you come across a word that you can’t read, you put one finger down on the page.) If you put all five down before the page is through, it’s a good reminder that you should put this book aside and read it later in the year. Right now, you should pick a book that is easier for you.

We ended the day with a great presentation from the Williston Fire Department. Special thanks to Thom Moore – firefighter and EMT, He’s Harley Moore’s dad.

Note: you should find a “Class Friendship List” (aka telephone list) in your child’s backpack today.

That’s it for now. Have a restful weekend.

David

October 1, 2010

October 1st, 2010

Dear Parents,

This was a week of reviewing and practicing our behavioral expectations while introducing another layer of academic work. In reading and writing (also known as Literacy,) we finished up our beginning-of-the year reading assessments; we wrote about our favorite secret place at home, and we introduced the idea of revising when we e read our piece to our friends and then added details we realized we had forgotten.

We studied two different story structures. First, we wrote a class-story following the story structure from the book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” Our title was, If You Give Amanda Gagne an Apple…(she’ll want to feed it to our worms!) We read several George and Martha stories to learn about story elements. We made cool hand signals to symbolize problem, solution, setting, and characters, and the kids flashed them at the appropriate times as I read the stories.

In Fundations (our phonics study), we have been doing a quick review of open and closed syllables, digraphs (like sh and ch), and blends. Many of the programs we use these days, from Fundations to Bridges (math), use lots of manipulatives and it’s important to practice how to take them out, use them purposefully, share them, and put them away.

Reading Homework: Reading homework will formally begin one week from Monday. One of the things the beginning-of-the-year reading assessments do is give me -- and you -- the reading level that is just right for your child: the independent reading level for when they are sitting reading alone, and the instructional level -- the reading level that is a little too hard but within their range if you read with them. Next week, I'll share your child's level with you, along with a website that you can visit. It allows you to plug in any book and see if it's a good fit for your child... very helpful for when you hit Barnes and Noble, the libraray, or the Scholastic Book Fair.


In Morning Meeting, we learned the No-no…game. We also played Zip Zap Zop, and we found how important it is to do check-ins so that if someone is having a hard day, we can all know about it and give that person some extra kindness.

In Math, we were all very excited to turn over the very last card for September. We figured out the pattern! We can’t wait to see what October brings. We opened new Math work stations, and practiced counting by twos, fives, and tens – frontwards and backwards. We also sorted a whole pile of coins and played some coin games.

In our study of Today and Long Ago, we compared and sorted many items -- from jet planes to horses and from flat-screen TVs to old black-and-whites.

Next week, of course, we will be taking a field trip to the Flynn on Monday. We’ll be back by 11:30.

Apologies: we have a new email system this fall, and I have had to work through some email-group bugs. You will probably see another test from me in the next few days as I work out the kinks. I’m sorry if you haven’t been getting the end-of-the-week emails from me. Remember, you can always just Google Bolger Class Blog to get to these Friday Letters. I have a bunch of wonderful work your children have completed, but want to have a chance to go over it and assess it before I get it into the Friday Folders.

Note: I have a home project that I need help on: I need to look up several boxes of my library books on a special website that identifies their “level”. Then I need to mark the level on the book. It’s even kind-of fun. I just don’t have the time to do it, and would love someone to grab a bunch, take them home, and mark them.

Note #2: Join Continental Math!: this is a great small-group, interactive, math-learning opportunity . Once a week or so, your child gets together with a parent volunteer and figure out some interesting math problems. You gain good skills, you come to see yourself as a mathematician, and you have fun working through problems with your buddies. Your child doesn’t need to be brilliant at math, just curious and willing to try!


Have a great weekend.

David

Sept. 24, 2010

Sept. 24, 2010

Dear Parents,

Good bye, Summer, and Welcome, Fall! The highlight of this week was our trip to Shelburne Farms. We learned how to make bread, we learned how to make cheese (while we chanted about Little Miss Muffet). We learned how to prepare sauce and toppings from the plants of the garden. Then, we rolled out the dough, spread the ingredients, popped our pizzas in the oven, and Yum Yum!

If any of you haven’t been to Shelburne Farms yet, you have to go. It’s an amazing place with cheerful, smart, kind staff people. They helped us pick up chickens, feed pigs, and milk a cow. They taught us about Reduce – Reuse – Recycle (and were very impressed that we already compost our cafeteria food waste at school). We sang songs and played lots of games. What a day! Your children wrote about their day at Shelburne farms, and a copy of their writing pieces are in the Friday Folder today.

In Math, the 1st and 2nd graders are both working with patterns. We think we have figured out the September pattern on our bulletin boards. We’ll know for sure in a couple of days.

In Reading, we finished our Read-aloud book, Sable, by Vermont author, Karen Hesse. What excellent writing! It’s a story about a Vermont girl who is dying to get a dog of her own when a stray appears on her doorstep. We won’t tell you what happens. You’ll have to read it yourself – but we loved it. Also in reading, we are just about finished with our beginning-of-the-year reading assessments. We will begin book groups as soon as we’ve had a chance to get a good, solid look at the data.

Yesterday and Today -- dried apples: we used a crank apple peeler today to peel, core, and slice apples. Then we put the apples in a dehydrator to make dried apple snacks.

Thank you, those of you who were able to make the open house – and thanks for your nice notes to your kids. We read them today. It was great to meet the parents behind these kids. If you weren’t able to make it, stop in and introduce yourself, and see the work your child has done --- the Hopes and Dreams dolls, the self-portraits, the Horizon flags, and the Math Art. If you weren’t able to make it, I have included in this Friday Folder a Horizon Parent Handbook, and your child’s “desk letter” to you. Please write something on the right hand side, and send it back for us to display. The kids stuffed their own Friday Folders today as a way of practicing listening skills. If you are missing any of the above pieces of paper, email me, and I'll look under the desks.

Overall, this group is settling in nicely. Lots of smiles! The kids have learned the schedule, the routines the expectations, and all the names of the many grown-ups who comprise our Horizon House. They now have a solid foundation as we begin to pick up the speed with the academics.

Other notes:

We collected and sorted insects in our Four Winds class today. We found a HUGE spider, but it wasn't poisonous.

Don’t forget our field trip the week after next to the Flynn Theater. Send in permission slips if you haven’t already.

We learned how to use an apple corer and we dried apples for a healthy snack today!
It’s a great time for apple picking – and a bag of apples is fun to sort – in a bunch of ways.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Mr. Bolger

Sept. 17, 2010

Sept. 17, 2010
Dear Parents,

We have had a great week! We finished our class rules, we wrote our hopes and dreams for the year, we decided on class jobs, we met our class pets, and we wrote about our first 12 days of school. We opened our class library, we talked about how to choose books that are just right for us, and we sang some great songs. Lastly, the students were so excited and proud to put up their “locker notes” from you telling them what you love about them! Thank you.

We began our fall Social Studies unit called Long Ago and Today. First and Second graders will be classifying things from the past and the present, and studying how some things change over time while other things remain the same.

Class volunteers: thank you, everyone, for sending in your "volunteer forms" telling us to what degree in in what capacity you could help out in our class this year. I love to have parents in the class, and as soon as we get our assessments done and our regular lessons up and running, I'll contact you to connect on how you would most like to participate.


Upcoming events:

Class Pictures (This Weds. 8:00 a.m. before our field trip): The individual pictures will be taken on “Retake” day – TBA. Note: This year the photo company has informed us that there will be an extra charge for picture orders that arrive after the pictures have been taken.

Shelburne Farms (Weds. 8:45 a.m. - 1:30 p.m). Please bring a bag lunch from home.

Curriculum Night and Dessert Social (Weds. 6:30-8:00 p.m.): see the orange colored paper in the Friday Folder. We hope you can make it. Sorry, we can’t invite students to this event.


Flynn Theater Field Trip (Monday, October 4th. 8:45-11:15): ”Laura Ingalls Wilder.” See the blue permission slip in the Friday Folder.

Happy Birthday, Olivia Roberts!

Have a great weekend, Everyone.

Sincerely,

David

Sept. 3, 2010

September 3^rd, 2 010

Dear Parents,

            Happy Friday!  Ok. I’ll give your children back.  For a couple of days.     I’d like to take this opportunity to, again, welcome you and your child to my class.  I’m looking forward to a happy, successful year.  We’ve had a great time at school this week getting to know each other.  The students have learned some of the procedures for using a variety of materials in the classroom. They’ve also helped to develop our classroom rules, and above all, we are learning that when we are kind and helpful, together we can do anything.

            This letter will encompass a variety of information to help the year go smoothly.  First, homework (which will be commencing  soon):   once reading groups are up and running, your child will be bringing home a book bag.  S/he should read on a daily basis for at least 15 minutes.  There will be a reading log to fill out on a weekly basis as well.

At the 1^st and 2^nd grade level, besides the 15 minutes of reading each night,  you can expect, 1-2 times per week, math homework that is part of the Bridges program.  This will come home in a math homework folder.  It will always be an extension of what we have done in class. It won’t be something that you are having to teach your child. Students  at this age should not be spending more than 30 minutes per night working on homework (reading + math).  If the time spent on homework consistently exceeds this, or if  you see that you child is struggling, please let me know and I will make some adjustments.  

            If your child would like to bring in a closeable water bottle to keep at his/her desk and fill up throughout the day,  I welcome that.  In addition, we will be having a short snack time each morning.  I am encouraging kids to bring (and trying , myself,  to bring, ) a healthy snack.  Some snack ideas are: fruit, vegetables, cheese and crackers, string cheese, yogurt, granola bars, hard boiled eggs, apple sauce, or pretzels.  One of our students in this class is allergic to tree nuts (if he eats them) --  but not allergic to peanuts , so peanuts are a great snack choice. 

Please also send in a change of clothes in a plastic bag that your child can keep on the top shelf in his/her locker in the event that he or she needs to change. 

**** There has been a change in policy this year, and the school nurse can no longer provide  extra clothing. 

Important Dates:

September 6^th- No School (Labor Day)

Sept. 22^nd  - Field Trip to Shelburne Farms

Sept. 22nd - Class picture taken at 8:00 a.m. sharp

Sept. 22^nd – Curriculum Night
Sept. 24th - Our first Four Winds  Lesson

Sept. 28^th – Early Dismissal

Reminder: If your child is leaving school at dismissal time in a way other than their typical daily transportation (bus, walk, or pick-up) please be sure to send a note to school.  You may email  your note, but please do so the day before, since I often do not have a chance to check my email during the day.

Please feel free to contact me at anytime.  We’re off to a great start, and  I look forward to getting to know you all better across the  coming  months.

Onward!

Mr. Bolger