Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Sugaring, The Big 4, Conferences

Hello Families,

I hope you have been enjoying the wonderful spring weather! We have been working hard on a number of skills here at school.

We will be making trips to the sugar house a regular part of our upcoming weeks. We will be collecting and boiling. I'm not sure who is more excited, me or the kids!

We will wrap up our persuasive writing this week and be transitioning into our works on our Personal Learning Projects (PLPs) for the rest of the year. We will be tying in our information writing to our projects. The projects will be made up of a formal writing piece, a poster and a model of some kind. We will be working on these for the remainder of the year.

Our literacy times have been filled with some great book shares by kids, kids doing their independent reading, meeting with individuals and small groups on reading and working on their own personal writing. Their volume and complexity of work is growing. An important note: This week on one of our morning messages the kids were asked by a classmate to write down what they read over the weekend. Many of the kids stated that they didn’t read anything. It’s always worth the reminder that it is important that kids are doing some reading everyday. I can’t stress the importance enough both in them learning a life skill as well as making sure they are getting opportunities to practice what we are working on in class. If you need any books, please let me know. We have a classroom library that the kids are welcome to sign out books from any time.

We’ve been talking a lot about our Big 4 at school. This is a time of the year when there is some cabin fever going on and the options for play have been relying heavily on imaginary play. While this is age appropriate and perfectly typical, we have run up against some physical rough housing that has crossed the line on what is acceptable and tolerable here at school (using objects, like sticks, for instance as well as unsafe bodies). I encourage you to talk further about this with your child as it makes sense.

We have had a few class meetings where We revisited our Big 4, especially “Make Safe Choices”. These talks with the kids are always so reassuring because there were a number of kids who knew that things might be getting crazy and knew they should have let an adult know, but didn’t. They felt responsible and was a perfect segue into discussions about being “upstanders”. I always wish we had cameras in these moments because they are powerful and I believe we as adults have a lot to learn from them in terms of honesty, integrity and forthrightness.

We also have parent conferences coming up! I always look forward to touching base about the great growth your child is making. Here is the link to sign up:

Again, my most sincere thanks to our amazing 4 Winds volunteers. Their efforts bring as needed element of science into our class and I can’t thank them enough for enriching our day. There was lots of tracking going on for days afterwards....

I think that’s about it. Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns or celebrations any time.

Enjoy the sugaring!

~B