I hope you had the time of your lives ❤️

 

PA and TD for the Week of 4-26

 KTD Lit will be exploring the picture book The Barnubus Project by The Fan Brothers. The story is about rejected pets from a peculiar pet store trying to escape the lab they were created in and see the world. The kids will be creating a pet in the style of Barnabus too!

KTD Math will be playing a dice game that focuses on doubling the number rolled and, using a chart I have at school, crossing out four numbers they double in a row. We are playing connect four!

1TD will be reading The Book of Bad Ideas this week. The story is a collection of ideas that kids have had, but they soon realize that they were bad ideas. "Never go down the stairs in a box with your friend." Clearly a bad idea. The kids will be writing and illustrating a page to add to the book based on their experiences. Lots of laughter this week, I'm sure!

2TD is going to begin a project that will take us to the end of the year. The kids will be evaluating past winners of The Caldecott Medal, an award given to one picture book a year that shows excellence in the illustrations and the text. The class will be given the criteria that is used by the people who select the winner and the same criteria will be used by the class. We will be reading winners that were written in the 1940's to the present. 

3PA will finish up our work on the short story "The Green Man" this week. Next, we will be reading the original version of Hans Christian Anderson's classic from 1843, "The Ugly Duckling." Our focus will be on how the duckling's identity was shaped by his experiences with others in the story. 

4PA have begun their group of three drawings showing The Secret Garden in three stages of development. Barren, growing, and splendor will be captured by the kids in their artwork. Each picture has a few quotes the students found in the text as evidence of the garden's development. 

5PA will continue reading their autobiographies and a work of fiction by the same author this week. We will also be spending a lot of our time remaining time this year on Capstone. I will have a date for when they will present by the end of the week, coordinating with the 5th grade team because the 5th graders will spend a whole day in PA presenting and watching what their classmates developed. 

PA and TD for the Week of 4-12

 Talent Development students will all be working with the poetry of Shel Silverstein this week. We will focus on creating spoonerisms that we learned about last week with Runny Babbit. Students will be taking different poems and rewriting them using spoonerisms. 

3PA will be reading a short story titled "The Green Man" this week. There are many layers to this tale that we will be discussing together. 

4PA will begin the week with a surprise, and then we will finish reading The Secret Garden. The kids will begin an art project relating to the book by the end of the week.  

5PA will begin a new unit this week. We will be reading an autobiography written by an author of fiction for younger people. The kids will be annotating the book using post it notes that will be color coded. 

New PA and TD Schedule

This is the new PA and TD schedule for 4th Quarter

4PA 9:30-10:30

2TD 10:30-11:00

KTD 11:30-12:00

5PA 12:35-1:35

3PA 1:35-2:20

1TD 2:35-2:55 

Safety First

 

Safety is our first priority at Brookdale, so I wanted to share a photo of what my classroom looks like as we head back to a five day schedule. The carpet circles have been measured out to have 3 feet of space on all sides. We will be safe and ready to learn!

PA and TD for the Week of 3-16

 KTD Lit will learn about the non-fiction text feature of captions this week. We will learn what they are for, what kinds of books will have them, and we will write some of our own using some very interesting pictures!

KTD Math will work on estimation and a video division problem using a chocolate bar. 

1TD will be using the information found last week to create an infographic poster with images and facts on the topic they explored. The remote kids can do a poster at home or a Google Slide. 

2TD will be discussing perspectives during our time together this week. How do two, or more, characters view the same event differently? Why can the same event be interpreted in different ways?

3PA Will continue reading The Girl Who Owned a City and exploring the change generalizations we developed at the beginning of the school year. This week, the group will also be using the Visible Thinking strategy called "Step In" focused on exploring viewpoints. Three questions will guide our thinking this week. What can this character perceive? What might this character know about or believe? What might this character truly care about? These questions will be examined for each character in the novel.

4PA will be using the same Visible Thinking strategy as the third grade group, but using the characters in The Secret Garden. The kids started this last week in small groups, and the conversations I heard were excellent! 

5PA has been very persuasive in asking to write sequels to the creative writing we did earlier this year using microscopic photography as their inspiration. The first stories were very clever and entertaining, so, we will be writing sequels this week in the same groups as before. This writing also allows for more Zoom socialization, something has been difficult to foster over a screen, but when I pop into breakout rooms and hear the kids being kids and laughing while they work, it almost feels like normal school.

Middle School Transition Night

 https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/NyVOlyx9lprqjAeMdiCLZUyxPFduEvrzqR6zSlNmyjqeaYsWQIiemyh3nqLBgXR_.I6xWuHWRwZs-xk1p Passcode: K=$2$&i1

The Zoom meeting last night was limited to 100 people, I'm not sure why, but the link and passcode above will take you to a recording of the meeting. 

Monday No PA

 Starting next Monday, I will be giving the IAR test to a small group of students, so there will not be PA. For the next three Monday's I will be assessing students in grades 3-5. 

PA and TD for the Week of 3-9

 KTD Lit will be reading the first book in a trilogy by Aaron Becker titled Journey. The kids and I will be discussing story elements like main idea and the problem and solution in the story.

KTD Math will be playing a game this week, where we will use questions to guess a mystery number. 

1TD will be using the website DK Find Out https://www.dkfindout.com/us/  for a research project on any topic that the students choose. The kids will create a way to share what they have learned with the whole group.

2TD will be reading the next section of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, working in teams on the visible thinking strategy of "See, Think, Wonder." After reading a chapter, kids will discuss what the most important thing they saw in the chapter, what they thought about the most, and what do they wonder about the story moving forward. 

3PA have reached the half way point in The Girl Who Owned a City. This week, we will continue to work on the change generalizations for the novel, and teams will be using the visible thinking strategy of "See, Think, Wonder" in small groups to help facilitate meaningful conversations about the book.

4PA has really gotten into The Secret Garden this year. During our time together this week we should get through a chapter a day, if you are following along at home. The group will continue to chart notes about the evolution of Mary and Colin and how Martha and Dickon are helping them, as well as looking for the meaning behind all of the symbolism in the text.

5PA has been working in teams to complete a variety of activities based on a folktale from Japan titled "The Enchanted Sticks." We will finish this work, and then move on to a short story by Shirley Jackson called "Charles" about a kindergarten class. Thursday will be a Capstone research day. 

PA Middle School Transition Night

 Good morning!

I hope that you are all doing well! Below is the Zoom info for the IPPA PTA Middle School PA Info Night. I will be sharing it on facebook and through memberhub as we get closer to the event, but I wanted to give it to all of you now so you have time to share it with your 5th grade families. Thank you for all you do and your help getting this info out!

Catey 

Catey Genc is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: IPPA PTA’s Middle School PA Info Night

Time: Mar 10, 2021 06:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89538223784?pwd=ZW9ibk56cEhMS000Si8rZXJXMk0zdz09

Meeting ID: 895 3822 3784

Passcode: 561257

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