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Timelines of our Lives – Homework due Nov 20th The idea to for each student to create a timeline of his/her life thus far. This will help us in our studies of history, in which it is important to be able to understand timelines. It is also just a fun way for kids to share with the class about their lives. I would imagine that students will need parent help accurately remembering and organizing events on the long page. Might do: Must do: 11-16-2008 It’s always great to get together with you folks at conference time. One of the big shockers to me is to hear from you that these little people I know as pretty well behaved, industrious, eager to please little guys and gals are apparently totally stubborn rapscallions on their home turf. Lucky me, I guess, to get to see them at their best. A little math update. 3rd graders are getting lots of practice with adding and subtracting fairly big numbers and are getting a firm foundation in the different models of multiplication and division. We’ve been doing quite a bit with areas of rectangles and also situations such as “12 crayons in each box and you’ve got 5 boxes…OR Each student gets 4 pencils and there are 50 pencils, so how many kids get pencils?” Second graders have been working with various models and situations for adding and subtracting and have been doing lots of practice making change. Soon we’ll have a little “store keeper unit” in which students will create stores, signs listing prices of imaginary inventory and go about buying and selling their wares. I think I’ve done this kind of thing every year that I’ve taught this age group, and we always get a lot of learning out of it. It feels much more real than workbooks. In fact, I recently stopped into Patch’s Market and had a previous student – now a ninth grader - give me change for snacks… and I KNOW she remembered giving me change for imaginary snacks seven years ago. Pretty cool, I thought. Oh, and speaking of Math – thanks a million to Darren at The Toy Chest for supplying us with the official Rat-a-Tat Cat card game! I’m very excited about the journal writing that the students have been doing around our Settlement of New England studies. They imagined themselves on the decks and between the decks of 17th century ships like the Mayflower, bound for New England. They imagined themselves young and old, passenger and crew, sick and well. The detail that they put into their entries shows that they have been pretty well steeped in this history over the past two weeks. This week we’ll probably each write two more entries, about our lives making new settlements. We’ll find some way to share these at the school Thanksgiving celebration on the 25th at 2 pm. Maybe then we’ll also have on display some of the work that groups of settlers have done as they’ve built (map) their villages and prioritized their tasks. How are you all doing on making those timelines!? It would be great to display them also for Thanksgiving time visitors. I should add that I am happy to provide more paper if what students already brought home became sort of a first draft or otherwise bit the dust. Imagining the work on this at your homes during this week, I think maybe we’d better not have any other homework. I’ll be clear with students that this is because I’m expecting their highest quality work.
Stay in touch!
Dexter
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