Happy New Year!

I would like to first of all like thank all of the families who gave such generous gifts to me during the holiday season.  I really felt an enormous amount of appreciation!

So far this year, the class has really hit the ground running. It seems that the children have matured during winter break.  Keep up the good work parents! Thank you for all of your support, it really does make all of the difference.

This week we have begun an new program called Brainology. It is curriculum that is designed to change the "habits of mind." Recent research is showing that people tend to fall into two categories on how they view intelligence.  Some people view intelligence as fixed and others see it as malleable.  People who have a fixed view of intelligence tend to have a more difficult time completing tasks that they feel they are not "smart" in.  While people with the malleable view associate being good at something as a result of hard work.  In Brainology, we are training students to adopt the malleable view of intelligence.  We will be celebrating when we make mistakes and when we struggle!  This is where the real learning takes place. Our attitude about ourselves makes all the difference in the world.

We had a perfect example of mindsets changing yesterday when Alexis and I were tutoring Juliet and Julius   after school on their basic math facts.  Both these students at the beginning of the year had the belief that they were "not good at math." Recently their mindsets have dramatically changed and they have been working diligently on memorizing their times tables.  It was amazing to watch these two students become so excited about the math game we were playing.  

This week in Humanities, we finished making our American History timelines of pre-revolutionary events.  In language arts we started analyzing the features of non-fiction texts.  We read an article in National Geographic called "Fancy Feathers."  We looked at the difference between facts and opinions in the article. Afterwards, each student wrote a brief summary of the article.  For book clubs we have almost finished reading Holes and Island of the Blue Dolphins. Next week we will be celebrating by watching the movie Holes and comparing and contrasting it to the book.