Good Morning,
Fall break is
in the air! I hope that you have exciting family plans over the
vacation. I know some of you will be jet setting to far away places and I
was hoping for a few favors. First, if you know that your student will
be gone on Thursday, please let me know so I can make sure they get
their beautiful artwork from Ms. Dazzio. Second, wherever you explore,
if you can continue our geography conversations in an authentic setting,
that would be incredible. Our Five Themes of Geography are
Location, where a place is on earth,
Place, the physical and human characteristics of a place,
Human/Environment Interaction, the way people and the environment affect each other,
Movement, the way people, goods, and ideas travel from place to place, and
Regions,
the ares in the world that have common physical, human, or cultural
characteristics. As you explore if your child thought about those five
big ideas that will really make geography come to life!
Thank you in advance for your ongoing conversations about
the ideas of thinking deeply, making meaning, and understanding. In
order to explicitly demonstrate the process adults and students go
through to learn something deeply rather than memorizing it and
forgetting it, students have generated 75 questions about the process.
From the 75 questions, students used critical thinking skills to sort the questions
into common themes and inferred what each question was really asking.
From there students generated 8 questions that we tested out yesterday
on our Building Resource Teacher Mrs. Barta. With her guidance students
decided to merge a few questions together and to explain what questions
were really asking. We now have 6 questions that students will be
interviewing Mrs. Brown, Mrs. O'Day, other 5th graders, and each of you
with! There is no RIGHT answer, but students are really wondering about
the idea if I understand something today will I understand it in 2 years
and how do I know that I really understand something. This
metacognition is at the heart of learning, because this reiterates the
idea that if I don't understand something in math, soccer, science,
cooking, etc I need to ask questions, I need to gather more information
until I can independently perform the task.
So thank you in
advance for your information and please know this process and these
questions are 100% kids thoughts, so if the questions aren't perfect,
ask your child, what they think the question is really asking, and how
they might answer the same question if it was given to them. The math
connection will be how we gather results from surveys that can't be
communicated with a bar graph. So any questions or suggestions you have
about that would be greatly appreciated by the students!
This
week, students are publishing their small moment personal narrative
writing piece. We started typing these in class yesterday within their
school Google Drive account so that they could easily work on it at home
and at school without the need of a flash drive. Students will have
another hour and a half to publish in school today. The parts that
aren't finished in class today will be taken home for homework. Tomorrow
students will use the rubric and self assess their writing and do a
written reflection that assesses and explains their progress on their
three self selected writing goals.
