Wild About the Rays Win

Doing My Part

Here I am wearing my Rays shirt in front of a traditional Navajo home. It's called a hogan. I did my part back in New Mexico over the summer to spread awareness of our team.

Today most of us are wearing our Rays gear. Photos will be posted tomorrow. I was playing highlights of what's being called "baseball's best game ever," as the students arrived. We celebrated this historic accomplishment.

I especially singled out the unlikely role Dan Johnson has played in two key Rays victories.

The Rays have a lot to teach us about how to achieve success in life. The Rays way (Joe Maddon's way) is to always stay positive, play smart, do your best (run hard to first), have fun (it's a game, afterall) and support one another. You don't have to have the most money to succeed, just the most heart, hope and hustle.

What's Going On This Week

Inside this classroom we have a busy week preparing for and taking several assessments. Students have finished units in history, math and vocabulary/spelling. We started reviewing last week and will continue early this week. So homework this week will be devoted to these subjects.

Demonstrating that they know the meanings and how to spell the key words in the Classical Vocabulary workbook lessons 1-3 will be on Wednesday. Students have been shown how to use their vocabulary mini notebooks to study the words. They've already had the first of two practice tests using their individual dry erase slates.

The History of US text, chapters 2-8 assessment will be on Thursday. They will have a list of key concepts and questions to use for review, plus their chapter notes.

The Math Unit 2 test is Friday. Students will have a study guide/practice test to complete. They used the same kind of test preparation material for Unit one.

For reading, we continue to study the fantasy novel The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. We took turns performing a key scene in the book. We're also taking notes on each chapter and noting some really choice words and phrases. The book is a gem.

Composing first drafts of a personal narrative about an experience continues this week. We learned about putting in internal thoughts and describing "tiny actions" to better explain lead characters in our writings. In the case of personal narratives, the lead character turns out to be the student himself or herself.

Don't forget to check your child's binder planner for the "daily reflection list." It's a nightly look back at the unique lessons and experiences of that day. Friday, for example, we briefly examined the science, geography and math involved in the space junk that returned to earth over the weekend.

Washing Up

Useful article on hand washing and schools.

Planting Potatoes and Carrots

Tuesday we participated in the first planting of our school garden in its new location just south of the old space. Our students gathered around one raised bed to learn how the soil was prepared and fertilized by parent volunteers.



Taking turns, students helped weed and plant potatoes and carrots. Later we'll add some corn.



Before we went out to the garden, students got a close up look at our seed potatoes all sprouting out dramatically. The potatoes we planted Tuesday were grown in the school garden last spring.

Planting Peace

A colorful giant peace sign grew before our eyes during today's commemoration of International Peace Day.

International Peace Day

Looking good at this morning's commemoration. Students designed peace symbols and wrote poems expressing a variety of sentiments on the subject of peace. There were inspirational messages from Dr. Bianco and others. See eBytes for more pictures and video of the event.

Important Poems/Technology Link

Students composed poems about things that were important to know about them. These were taken over to Technology Class for the text of an animation project taught by Mrs. Baralt. Here's her explanation of how it worked:

Students used the program Frames to create digitally animated characters of themselves reading important poems modeled after those in Margaret Wise Brown’s book The Important Poem. Characters were created by manipulating and layering shapes. Then, after selecting a relevant background, students duplicated frames altering mouths and eyes to animate their character. Finally, students edited their frames so the length of the images matched the length of the recordings. Timing mouth and eye movements with breaks in speech was especially challenging!

Here's the link.

This Week

Students practice keyboarding skills three times per week for 15 minutes. Ask your 4th grader about it.

Tuesday we participate in planting the school garden. Wednesday is International Peace Day celebration. Tonight's homework is to work on the peace poems and decorate a peace symbol we've distributed. I was impressed with their planning and first drafts.

We're reviewing the first three vocabulary lessons and word lists this week. So most of this will be done in class.

I have been encouraging each student to make a list in his/her planner of the unique highlights for each day. We call this the Daily Reflection List or DRL. I hope this becomes a regular feature of your nightly interaction with your child. Today, for instance, the students enjoyed a presentation from the school librarian Mrs. Smay on the Sunshine State Books contest. Later I talked about an impromptu Christmas truce during World War I.

In math we're exploring multi-digit subtraction and addition. Our weekly times facts test scores are improving for everyone. We are finishing our study of Jamestown colony in history.

In Science we continue to explore what conducts or insulates electricity. Again ask a fourth grader to explain.

We're in our second week reading and carefully studying The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. We plan some readers' theater presentations on some of the more exciting scenes. Students are encouraged to identify, in their own independent reading, passages that would also be appropriate and enjoyable to perform.

Technology and Art rotate for a series of twice a week for three weeks sessions. Art starts tomorrow.

To Tell the Truth: John Smith

Here's our presentation on Captain John Smith at this morning's Town Meeting.

Just Right Reading Level Books

With permission I am posting here some important comments my colleague Jill Lemon wrote in her blog the other day about the importance of book selection.

Last week I finished conducting our reading assessments and began one-on-one conferences with students, all with the intention of helping students select just-right books. In our mini lessons, we are focusing on a multitude of behaviors good readers demonstrate, helping everyone make concrete what it is that good readers do. One of the behaviors in which good readers engage is to select books that are just-right for them. Research demonstrates that students who find books to read that are not too difficult or too easy will experience greater success in reading. Most students, however--and this is an issue in schools across the country!--are reading books that are simply too difficult for them.

To help students understand the importance of finding just-right books, I make a sports analogy: if I wanted to learn to play tennis, the best place to learn as a beginner would NOT be at Wimbeldon with Rafael Nadal. Rather than learn to play, I would simply get pummeled, my skills not improving and my self-confidence pouring down the tubes. No matter how many times we played--if that was the only experience I was having--I would simply not improve. Rather, I need to play against someone who is willing to play just above my level, who will help teach me how to become a better player: the challenge of Nadal is not one that will improve my ability. I need one that is just right for me. The experience of learning to reads works much the same way: we need to read books that are just a tad bit difficult in some way, along with explicit, solid instruction, to learn to become stronger readers.

Together, we identified some signs that a book is not just-right:

1. reading is not smooth (fluency)
2. reading is not expressive (fluency)
3. reading is too slow (fluency)
4. student stumbles over words--over 5 per page is too many (decoding)
5. student fails to recall or understand what s/he read (comprehension)

Students and I have been reading together as I ask them to judge--using the above criteria--whether or not the book feels too difficult. Then, most often, I am guiding students to different book choices. Needless to say, this has been difficult process for some students. Many students seem to believe that if a book they are reading is found to be too difficult, that they have failed in some way. Many have argued with me that they "always stumble over words that way--I like to be challenged." I am trying to help them see that they should NOT be stumbling over words that way, and that doing so is not helping improve their reading skills. (When they experience difficulty retelling me what they have read, they are more easily convinced, however.) These are very imbedded beliefs that we will work diligently to change.

The Rugby World Cup

When we were visiting New Zealand this summer, they were gearing up to hold the Rugby World Cup there this summer. It starts today. I have put a link to this event here. We are going to check it out in class.

The Reading Log

Suggestions for how students might respond to their independent reading are listed on the first page of their reading logs. We are looking for students to develop multiple ways to reflect on what they are reading. Experienced readers do all these things naturally. We are hoping to foster an inner dialogue between our young readers and the authors of their books. Students are taught how to tune into their feelings, questions, wonderings, predictions as they read and then analyze and record these reactions in their logs.

Reading Workshop

Reading (independently chosen) books and writing about them go together daily. Here Lucas M. is looking for examples of how this book's author describes characters and places. I earlier had shared (from the novel I'm reading) some examples of quality descriptions of characters in Dickens' Great Expectations. I then challenged students to look for examples in their own reading and mention them in their reading logs. This process of a mini lesson from me followed by time for reading and writing about their reading is a daily feature.

Vadim Reads in French

Vadim B. shared his French books with the class. He may someday go to school in his native France and needs to be prepared. He takes after school lessons several times a week. Here he read and translated a passage in French.

Admiring Others' Writing

Our class admired and learned from the display of "Important" poems written by Ms. Telemachos' class.