May 15, 2011

May 15, 2011

Dear Parents,

"Oh, look, children. Vermont is a good example of a rainforest..."


Writing: now that we have become better writers, we went back the stuffed animal stories we had written earlier in the year, and we are adding detail and voice to make them even better. Most of the kids are ready for their final drafts, and you will be seeing them soon.

Reading: we are doing the final round of reading assessments this week. For first graders, reading a level H passage independently (with high accuracy and comprehension) is reading “on-grade-level”. For second graders, a level H means they are on-grade-level.

Science Workshops: we just completed our second week of studying animal habitats – from deserts to rainforest to the ocean to our own backyards.

Half-day coming up: Tuesday, May 17th, will be a half day.

End-of-year picnic: On Wednesday, June 15th, Horizon House will be going on an end-of-year picnic (parents and families invited) to Maple Street Park in Essex Junction. We are looking for a couple of grilles. Please let me know if you have one and can transport it for us.

Compost: We had a great compost day on Saturday. Lots of smiles. The kids shoveled their brains out. And many thanks to the parents who came to be part of the day. Thanks, also, to Ian Batson, Janelle Poulos, and Timmy Carpenter, former students of mine who were indefatigable. The proceeds will go to buying compost and tools for our school garden.

Have a nice beginning of the week!

David

April 8, 2011

Dear Parents,

The Reading Restaurant will take place this coming Wednesday, April 13th. Here is a reminder of the shift your child is in and how many people we have down for your party. Please let me know ASAP if your number has changed.

The first shift should arrive at 6:00 p.m. as the first restaurant begins promptly at 6:15 p.m. (6:15-7:00). The second-shift students should arrive at 7:00 p.m. for their 7:15-8:00 shift. Students should come dressed in their chiton (toga). We have Greek head-wreaths here for the children to put on when they arrive.

Thank you.

David

First Shift:
Amanda Li: Maitre D’ (3 guests)
Evan (3), Sean, (3) and Jagger (3): chefs
Diego (2) : busperson and food server
Olivia (3), Harley (3), Luna (3), and Kayla (5): waitresses

Second Shift
Kyle (4): Maitre D’
Grant (3) and Ruben (4): chefs
Carlie (3), Alyssa (3), Samantha (3), and Adia (3): Waitresses
Anna (3) and Amanda G (3): buspeople and food servers


Can’t wait to see you all and share the great writing these kids have done.

March 18, 2011

March 18, 2011

Dear Parents,

Report Cards: look for them in your child’s Friday Folder today. If your child skied, then you can come by and pick it up off your child’s desk in the classroom.

Reading Restaurant -- Weds. April 13: Your Reading Restaurant invitation is on a bright sheet of paper in today’s Friday Folder too. Please pull it out, sign it, and return it on Monday.

Our Theme in this Classroom: Greek Inventions.
Attire: Togas – er—um, “Chitons”. See the instructions in the Friday Folder for helping your child make his or her own for the R.R.

Can You Help? I would love to have help next week tracing a dozen or so overhead-projector images of Greek inventions onto butcher paper for the kids to then color in. We also need to make a door to our restaurant –made out of either a slit butcher paper image of Greece or a door made from a fridge box with an image painted on that.

Bridges Math Night: March 29th, 6:30-8:30 in the WCS dining hall. You’ll have a chance to do some math the Bridges way-- some math activities – to get a feel for how it’s done. It should be interesting. Childcare, refreshments, and door prizes.

Conferences: If you haven’t signed up yet and don’t know how, contact me and I can resend the link. Conferences are this coming Friday and the following Friday. Feel free to bring the report card with you. I look forward to seeing you. Email if you have any questions.

That’s it for now. Oh, yah. That and the fact that it's almost sunbathing weather out there.

Talk to you soon.

David

March 9, 2011

March 9, 2011

Dear Parents,

Well. That was a thumping. Raise your hand if you’re sore from shoveling.

It was good to finally start the school week today! We spent writing time today using good details, how our families fared in the blizzard. We are excited that Reading Restaurant will take place on the 13th of April, and we’ll have a chance to share all our writing with you.

Because we’re getting a late start to the week, there will be no Letters-to-Home journal coming home tonight. We will pick that up next week.

Parent-Teacher Conferences: Please sign up for conferences on March 25th and April 1st. (12:00-4:30). I sent you a link today in an email.

Buy your Variety-Show tickets tomorrow!: The Williston FAP Annual Variety Show sells out fast. It is this Friday (7:00-9:30 p.m.) It’s always a blast – with students, teachers, parents, and other community members performing. Horizon Teachers and Parents will be singing two songs – Good Lovin’ by the Rascals, and I Can See Clearly Now by Johnny Nash. Tickets are $5.00 apiece. They are on sale only at WCS ( in the front hall) from 7:30 a.m. to 8:15 a.m. and in the afternoon from 2:30-3:45.

Reading Logs: Please keep up with the reading logs this week. We will be tallying them and picking from the treasure chest on Friday. By the way, thank you to those of you who have generously contributed to our Reading Treasure Chest. The kids are blazing through my kids’ forgotten Hot Wheels cars, so we welcome any little old toys you would like to pass on in the name of reading!

Greece: We are beginning our workshops on Greece tomorrow. They will go for five weeks. Students will learn about Greek inventions, Greek pottery, Greek Drama, the Greek Olympics, and the overall connection between Greek culture and our own.

Have a great rest of the week, everyone. See you at conferences.

David

January 28, 2011

Dear Parents,

Report cards will be coming out in the middle of March, and we’ll be emailing you in February about signing up for the report-card-conferences.

In Second Grade Math, students are learning that you subtract when you are “taking away” something. You also subtract when you are finding the difference between two quantities. So, if I have six jelly beans and I give you 2 of them, I would say, “6 take away 2 = 4 left.” If, on the other hand, I have six jelly beans and you have 2 jelly beans, and the question is, “What is the difference between us? It’s not correct to say, “6 take away 2 =4” because there is no “taking away” happening. It’s important to say “6 subtract 2= 4. Five is the difference.” This become important in 3rd and 4th grade when kids have to find the difference between two quantities and really struggle to picture the operation to use because they have always associated subtraction with take-away.


Take away:

six take away two = four left over.
x x x x x x
6-2=4

Difference:

I have six and you have two. What is the difference (between your # and my #)?

Me: x x x x x x
You: x x

I can read this as 6-2=4 because I can take my six. And compare them to your two.

I subtract the number of mine that are the same as yours (we both have two). That leaves me with the difference between us:

(my) 6 minus the 2 (of yours that are the same as the two of mine) = the 4 (that are the difference between us because only I have them.)

An easier way to solve difference problems is to count up from your 2 to my 6:

Me: x x x x x x
You: x x

Your two plus _____ reaches my 6.

Hmmm. The difference must be 4.
4 is the answer.

"Busted!": ask your second grader why we said "Busted!" to each other today. (The answer is that while we were practicing "difference" problems, if one partner mistakenly said "take away" instead of "subtraction" and "difference", the other partner could say, "Busted!"


First Grade Math-This week students learned about the Little Blue Penguins. They learned that they are 16 inches tall and can weigh 2-3 pounds. Students are comparing them to two penguins (The King Penguin and The Rockhopper Penguin) that they learned about last week. What can your child tell you about any of these penguins. Can they compare them? For example, how much taller is the King Penguin compared to the Little Blue Penguin. Here is the info so you will know:

Rockhopper Penguin- 18 inches tall and 5-6 pounds

King Penguin- 36 inches tall and 30 pounds.

They also learned some new games. One game is called Help A Skuwa.
Can they tell you what a Skuwa is? (It is a bird that is a predator of the penguin. ) This game reminds you of Old Maid. The students are practicing two digit numbers and matching them to a picture. More next week about some other games they are learning.

First Grade Fundations: Students are beginning a new unit on “glued sounds” such as –ang, -ing, -ink, -and unk.

Second Grade Fundations- We finished up our unit on suffixes. More on what's coming up soon.d We are in our third round of our Science workshops. Ask you children how the workshop went this week and how it blends with what they learned in prior weeks about Solids, Liquids and Gases.

We talked about wearing glasses. Both Mr. B. and Ruben both got glasses this week, and we all talked about how it feels awkward to wear them at first, but you sure can see better and do more if you put them on. You can notice more when you are doing science experiments, you can see the board more easily in math, you can read the handwriting letters on the wall, so your handwriting will be neater, You can see from far away if your friend is up on the hill or not! And then there’s the fact that everyone tells you that you look smarter if you wear glasses. So, if you have a friend who is embarrassed to wear their glasses, tell them to go ahead and put them on so they can look smart and be smart!

Looking for a few good singers. The Horizon House Band is still looking for a few parents who would like to join us in the WSD Variety Show on March 11th. A few songs we are considering singing right now are Peace Train, Good Lovin’, and Return to Sender. We’d love you to join us. l

Half-day coming up: Next Tuesday, February 1st is a ½ day for a teacher inservice.

Have a great weekend!

David

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