So much learning!

I am so pleased to announce that our classroom culture is well underway of being established. We have begun many of our routines that we will be doing throughout the year. One of our daily routines will be power writing. Students are given a daily writing assignment to be completed in 5 to 10 min. The object of this routine is to establish goals for fluency. During power writing, students are only concerned with words per minute. This enables the student to feel the joy of writing without the stress of making sure that the writing is perfect. Another language arts activity we are doing is learning about powerful sentences. Ask your child about different types of powerful sentences we have studied. These include; travelers, double the who, and triple-decker sentences.
One of our first projects has been to create a school map. The purpose of the map is to identify ecological zones of the school campus and create an emergency evacuation plan. We are learning math skills associated with this activity such as area, perimeter, and scale too.
Learning is so much more meaningful when we see the purpose behind what we are doing! Don't forget to include your child in meaningful learning opportunities like estimating a grocery bill or figuring out the tip at a restaurant. Also, not having mandatory homework assigned means that you can read to your child at night. I am currently reading the Fellowship of the Ring with my son. (I know the title should be underlined but I don't have that feature on my blog)!
Just a reminder, 3-day student paperwork is tomorrow.

Family Night

It seems that we are off to a wonderful start this year. Don't forget that tomorrow is our family night, September 22nd, from 3:00 to 6:00. It will be an opportunity for you to come in and see our progress so far this year. Our class just finished ratifying our class constitution so please join us tomorrow night.
So far this year we have built a strong sense of class community. This is reflected in both social and academic areas of the classroom. Academically, we are learning the concepts of multiple drafts and the need to receive kind, helpful, and specific feedback from our classmates. Students are learning the value of taking pride in our work and not just finishing for the sake of getting it done. You can see this in the improvement in our many drafts and work presented in the classroom.
Tomorrow we are going to begin a mini-project, mapping the school grounds. This project will incorporate many math skills such as area, perimeter, and scale. The final product will be used for emergency procedures as well as a general map for visitors for the school. I can't wait to share more purposeful learning with you all tomorrow night.

This is going to be a great year!

Hello IA families! I hope everyone had an unexpectedly fun 3-day weekend. Last week we had a wonderful time getting to know our classmates and playing a lot of team building activities. We also had our first professional speaker come in. Robin, Jordan's mom, came in to teach us about the wild world of culinary school. We learned that cooking is also; math, science, management, art, carving, sanitation, and even French. Afterwards we carved a 115 lbs. watermelon then added the fruit we brought. During the activity each student added their fruit and said something about themselves. We used the fruit basket as a metaphor of our class community. We we able to feed the entire school with this one fruit basket. Way to go class!
This week we will continue exploration with our class culture and more team building activities. Today we will draft our classroom constitution to establish our code of conduct in the classroom.