Boo!

What a terrific week. We began with an author celebration and ended with Fall Festival. Wonderful, exciting, exhausting!

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend the author celebration on Friday. It was tremendous. You know, I read and reread and rereread the students' work, but it always sounds brand new when I hear it in front of a devoted and captive audience as performed by the authors themselves. It was a joy for me. And a truly wonderful birthday gift as well. I was so impressed with the students' readings, and I know they were thrilled to have all of you present. We cannot wait to do it again!

In math we are nearing the end of our unit on decimals and measurement. Many concepts taught in this unit are tricky. Students are certainly becoming more adept at comparing decimals, supported particularly through games such as Decimal Top-It. Adding and subtracting decimals continues to be a challenge for many, for many of the same reasons students struggle to accurately add and subtract multi-digit numbers.  Certainly, learning about metric measurement has supported student understanding of decimals and place value. Most recently, students have been working to convert measurements, such as centimeters to millimeters, or decimeters to meters. This has proven to be tricky as well. After some review on Wednesday, students will be assessed on their understanding of skills taught in unit four on Thursday.

Students are also enjoying tackling some difficult problem solving activities as well. Last week, after working through a trickier, multi-step problem, students were able to share with the class their processes for solving.  Students were able to identify many accurate ways to solve the same problem, and were also able to share with the larger group their reasons for making the choices they did.

Our room continues to buzz during reading workshop.  Last week in a fish bowl, Ari and Sammy modeled both ineffective and effective partner conferring. During their ineffective conference, Ari and Sammy simply read to one another their Post-it thoughts, never really stopping to talk about one another's ideas. In the effective conference, the pair spent time discussing each other's notes, asking one another questions and probing one another to go further. In general, students are working to truly listen and respond to their partners during these conferring sessions.

Of course, crucial to this process is having rich, thoughtful notes from which to springboard conversations. On this we continue to work as well. Specifically, students tend to write down questions about their reading, even if at times they feel they can infer answers to their questions. We are working as a group to take our questions further--to stop after asking a question and wonder:

• Do I already have a possible answer to my question?
• Is my question important to the central themes of the book?
• Can I identify other spots in my reading where the question is addressed?

Going deeper reinforces deeper understanding of the texts they are reading. In turn, richer conversations between partners result.

Students are still working to identify spots within the room from which they can read effectively and prevent distractions. Students are expected to read with focus for at least a half hour each day, in addition to the time they spend logging, conferring with me and/or their reading partners.  This week, students will reflect upon their reading logs and consider what types of genres they are reading, mapping their choices in a bar graph. After this, we will of course develop goals about how we'd like to challenge ourselves to stretch and try others genres of fiction.

In writing we have begun a unit on poetry. As we began many new units in all content areas, students considered what they know already to be true. We captured everyone's thoughts on poetry in a web.

In our unit, students will be focusing on writing free verse poetry, avoiding the constraints that rhyming adds to the writing process. As a model for free verse poetry writing, we have been reading All the Small Poems, and Fourteen More by Valerie Worth. These precious poems are all written about seemingly mundane objects. To jump start their writing processes, students brainstormed, traveling the classroom in search of potential inspiration. Students wrote drafts by simply writing descriptive paragraphs about their objects. Next, we will tackle line breaks. Students will learn that poets use line breaks for a few reasons: to make the poem sound a certain way, to make it look a certain way, and to create emphasis and phrasing. In a sense, line breaks give the reader reading instructions, much like punctuation does in most writing. Some students have moved from writing about insignificant object to significant ones. We will work to revise our poems, infusing them with truly descriptive language to engage our audience.

This Thursday and Friday at 2:45 are the LAST two meetings for information about the trip to Puerto Rico. If you are interested in learning more, please come to the Spanish room (K-1) in the Kindergarten wing. If you can not attend, read Señora Bockman-Pedersen's blog and click on the 'Vamos a Puerto Rico' page. ¡Gracias!  You may also email Señora Bockman-Pedersen at bbp@shorecrest.org for more information about the trip.

This week students completed their electricity project Voice Threads. Look for published Voice Threads here at the end of the week.

Upcoming important events:
November 7: no school
November 11: Poetry in the Park
November 12: Seussical
November 21 - 25: Thanksgiving break