PA and TD for the Week of 9-17

PA Curriculum Night is Wednesday the 19th from 6:00-7:00 in the LMC.

Kindergarten-Second Grade TD will be continuing the small group work from last week.  These groups will include every student in grades K-2 until I have met with all the students in each class.

3PA will continue our journey to Planet Shine in The Green Book this week.  I created a hyperdoc and put it into the 3PA Google Classroom.  This hyperdoc has links to different activities and questions that we will be working on as we read the novel.  The kids will also be keeping a journal, stepping into the shoes of the main character, Pattie, to record what her experiences are like in this strange new world. The group will also focus on how characters respond to challenges as we read. 

4PA will begin reading the classic novel The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett this week.  I have a link to an audio version of the story that kids can use (on the left side of the PA site under student resources), while following along in their copy, to get the rhythm of the dialect and get the right voice in their heads as they read.  The students will be recording how the main characters change as they read.  There are several new forms in their Google Drives that we will be using for this over the next several weeks. 

5PA will continue reading the short stories of Ray Bradbury during our time together this week.  One theme that will run through this unit is how does Bradbury draw readers in and use sentence structure and word choice to capture the attention of the reader.  Last week, every student picked a highlighter color that will be used exclusively to mark sentences or words that drew them into the text.  At the end of this unit, the kids will be having a comprehensive Socratic Seminar on Bradbury as a writer and how he uses words and structure differently from other writers.  This week, we will be reading "All Summer in a Day", a short story about a group of children living on Venus. 

Join the Project Arrow PTA

This year, all of the 204 elementary schools are encouraging parents to join the PA PTA.  You will hear more about this at Curriculum Night, Wednesday the 19th @ 6:00 in the LMC.  The link makes it easy for you to support the work we do in PA.  I will also have laptops available on Curriculum Night for those interested in joining.  It literally takes 2 minutes. Thanks everyone.

https://ippapta.memberhub.store/

Filmmaker Visit at Brookdale

Brookdale Families,

    On September 21st, the Brookdale 4th and 5th graders are going to have a special visit from award winning documentary filmmaker and producer, Caryn Capotosto. Caryn will be sharing clips from some of her films, talking about the process of turning a story into a film with her friend Mr. Schumann, and what it's like to live out your childhood dreams in this special visit.  Her most recent film, Won't You Be My Neighbor, chronicles the life of Mr. Fred Rogers and his groundbreaking television show for kids that ran on PBS for decades.  This film is all about kindness and how Mr. Rogers taught generations of children and adults to be kind. 

   Some of her other films focus on music. The Music Of Strangers is about the cellist Yo Yo Ma bringing musicians from around the world to play together using the language of music. Back-up singers for the greatest musicians of the last 50 years were shown in the film she produced titled 20 Feet From Stardom which won an Academy Award in 2014 for Best Documentary Feature Film. Last year Caryn won her first Emmy for a documentary she produced on PBS.  We are excited to have her come to our school to speak with the students.

  

A Conversation with Ray Bradbury

PA and TD for the Week of 9-10

Kindergarten TD small groups will begin this week.  I will be meeting with groups of six kids until I have seen every kindergartner at Brookdale.  We will be making dots for our upcoming celebration of International Dot Day to embrace making our mark at school and beyond.

First Grade TD small groups also begin this week.  The first graders will be coming to my room to create their own page for The Z Was Zapped.  I will be seeing every first grader over the next few weeks to do this activity.

Second Grade TD will begin our small  group adventure with a poetry activity based on the book Lemonade and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word. Pairs of students will be working together to create as many small words using letters from a larger word using Scrabble tiles.  The pairs will then write a short poem using only the smaller words about the larger word.  

3PA is going to start our first novel of the year, The Green Book by Jill Patton Walsh.  This science fiction tale explores what it would be like to have to leave Earth and go on a voyage to another planet to develop and call home.  The students will be working on developing their understanding of our PA change generalizations as we go through the novel.

4PA finished two readings of the short story "The Power of Light" last week.  This week we will be using hexagons to show thematic connections that text has with a novella that we will be reading titled The Mozart Question. Both stories are set during WWII and tell different stories of survival and triumph. The students will create their own categories of connections that they will code using different colors of dry erase markers on laminated hexagons.  The hexagons will be put together in a hive, but each side that touches another hexagon must show a connection between the two stories. 

5PA is about to embark on a literary adventure into the wonderful world of Ray Bradbury.  We will begin our journey with a powerful story, an allegory of sorts, set during the Dust Bowl. A farmer, his wife, and their two children are driving west, searching for work after their farm blew away.  They run out of gas near a small farm house surrounded by a huge field of wheat, but the farmer discovers that the field, and the old man who used to tend it, are not what they appear to be. The kids and I will be reading "The Scythe" all next week. 

PA and TD for the Week of 9-3

It's that time of year again, CBM testing for our K-1 students.  These assessments can take up to 50 minutes for each student and they are given individually.  I will be working with the entire support team to administer these tests on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I will not be meeting with my groups on those days.

KTD will continue our author study of Peter Reynolds on Thursday and Friday.  We will be reading Ish and Beautiful Dreamer.  I posted the video of Peter Reynolds and how he can create anything by simply starting with a dot. 

1TD will begin exploring the book The Z was Zapped this week. 

2TD classes will be diving into the Chris Van Allsburg story The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. This is one of my favorite books of all time because of the thinking it encourages.  

3PA has started off the year in spectacular fashion!  We only have two days, so we will continue our work from last week and explore the short story "Shells" by Cynthia Rylant. 

4PA will be finishing their version of the poem "Famous" on Thursday.  On Friday, we will review the concept of change, the categories of change, and start reading a short story set in Poland during World War II titled "The Power of Light" by Isaac Singer.

5PA was so absorbed in The Collector of Moments, some kids have three pages of notes in their Google Drives with clues that will lead to the theme of the story.  Groups of kids will be working on a visible thinking strategy called "color, symbol, image" to share their thoughts about the book on Friday. 

Ready Set Draw-ish! Peter H. Reynolds' THE DOT

PA and TD for the Week of 8-27

Kindergarten Talent Development small groups will not begin until the first week of October, but I will start working with our newest Bobcats on Monday. This week, I will be seeing each class in my room to begin an author study of Peter Reynolds.  Over the next two weeks, I will be reading four of his books to the kids. We will be using these books for a project later this month.

1st Grade Talent Development will also begin with a few whole class activities this week.  I will be meeting with all four first grade classes to share two picture books.  Please, Open This Book and Ted. These are fun and engaging stories that students love.  I'll be introducing myself to the kids and explaining what my job at Brookdale is all about during our 40 minutes together.

 

2nd Grade Talent Development will also begin with whole group activities this week. Our first week will be similar to first grade, just a few fun stories and introductions.  I will be sharing The Book With No Pictures and The Wreck of the Zephyr with all three second grade classes. 

3PA will begin our journey by discussing a reoccurring theme in the PA curriculum, change.  The kids will be exploring categories of change in order to develop some generalizations about change.  How do things change? What causes change? Are there different types of change? We will use these generalizations all year long, but will begin applying them to a short story by Cynthia Rylant titled "Shells." I have already shared all of the documents the kids will need to their Google Drives.  Please make sure to charge your Chrome Books up because we will be using them almost everyday in PA this year.

4PA is staring off the year with some poetry.  We will be using two poems to explore different literary elements that we will learn about during our first semester together.  The kids will be reading "Birdfoot's Grandpa" by Joe Bruchac and "Famous" by Naomi Shihab, both poems are already in their Google Drives.  Teams of students will be working to identify examples of different literary elements in the poems and working to pull out the theme of each piece.  We may have time to begin writing our own version of the poem "Famous" by the end of the week. 

5PA might be my favorite grade to start the year with because of the opening activity I have done the last five years. I will be sharing a very complex picture book that takes about three hours to read and dissect titled The Collector of Moments by Quint Buchholz.  Finding the theme will be the primary focus, and we will end the week with applying this theme to the work we will do in PA all year long.  You might hear the kids asking about why its not good to be a deaf horse and listening to the music coming from art...but I promise it will all make sense.  The documents the kids need are already in their Google Drives.  

PA Times

3PA will meet M-F 10:20-11:10

4PA will meet M-F 2:25-3:25

5PA will meet M-F from 12:00-1:00

Please bring a one inch three ring binder to PA during the first week.  We will be doing a lot of our work on the Chrome Books this year in an effort to go paperless, but I still have some old school paper projects as well.  

Thank you all for the kindness you have shown me since my accident.  It means a lot. See you this Friday for our first day! 

First Day of PA and PA Curriculum Night

The first day of Project Arrow will be on Friday the 24th. I am so excited to start a new year with my old friends and look forward to meeting my new friends. Posts about PA times and what to bring will come once school starts. Most of the supplies I’ve got covered, just a two inch three ring binder is all I need to get the year started.

Talent Development will begin during the first quarter. I’ll be teaching lessons with literature and investigating higher level thinking and creativity with all K-2 students for the first month of school. 

Our Project Arrow Curriculum Night will be held in the LMC on Wednesday, September 19th from 6:00-7:00 pm. I will walk you through what PA will look like in each grade level and answer any questions you have about our program. 

I haven’t been this anxious for a school year to start since I began teaching at Brookdale in August of 1997. I was excited and nervous then, and I am excited and nervous now for the same and for very different reasons. The Brookdale community has been wonderful to me over the years. Welcome back guys...and don’t knock my cane over!!! 

My Best,

Mr. Schumann 

Welcome Back

So, it’s been a while friends, and the new school year awaits.  I’ve had a difficult and remarkable recovery from a horrible fall and several painful operations. 2018-2019 GAME ON BROOKDALE! It’s time to get back to work friends. I ask for your patience as my physical limitations will impact the start of this school year, but know it is temporary. I’m still recovering from a devastating injury, but I can see the light again and look forward to seeing you all in August. My recovery is ongoing. Know that I’m going to do my best each day, but it’s going to take some time to get back to normal again. See you soon.

Mr. Schumann