10/8/13

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.

In reading, we will finish up our first round of fiction book clubs. Students collaborated to identify what their daily reading and daily jobs should look like. It is exciting to see students hold each other responsible for their reading and see that coming prepared allows for deep and meaningful conversations.

In science, we are focusing on how each of the body systems are interdependent. Students will learn the parts of the respiratory system and the parts of the circulatory system. The bigger learning for all systems is what the purpose of the system is and how the system interacts or is interdependent with the other systems.

Field trip permission slip forms will be completed online. Once you have submitted this, please let me know either with an email or a note.

Thank you for sharing your child with me each day! They are such incredible thinkers!
Megan