Friday, December 18, 2020
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Enjoy Winter Break!
Thank you to all the families who gave me the generous gift card! Have a safe and restful winter break. I’m looking forward to no Zoom, finishing my move from my Wisconsin home, and recharging for a better 2021. Your children have been troopers so far this year and I’m very proud of them.
Enjoy this time everyone.
Mr. Schumann
Monday, December 7, 2020
PA and TD for the Week of 12-7
KTD Math will continue working with the Magic Cross addition puzzle I introduced last week. Here's the best part, the puzzle works with any 5 consecutive counting numbers!
KTD Lit's exploration of the wordless picture books of David Wiesner will move forward this week. We will finish Sector 7 and make connections to Mr. Wuffles as well.
1TD will be introduced to Ted this week. Ted is an imaginary friend to a boy with a father who works too much, and Ted and the father are VERY different. This week we will continue to learn about story elements and focus on how different these two characters are in this picture book.
Friday, December 4, 2020
Monday, November 30, 2020
TD for the Week of 11-30
KTD Math will be learning an addition trick using five consecutive counting numbers. When the numbers are put into a cross shape, you can find many combinations that give an equal horizontal and vertical sum. We will be challenged with the magic cross puzzle.
KTD Lit continues our reading of the wordless picture books by David Wiesner. This week, we will be exploring Sector 7, to see where clouds are made in a huge factory in the sky, and how a field trip to NYC ends with a cloud coming home with a student.
PA for the Week of 11-30
3PA will be sifting through all of the information and facts we learned about the top ten greatest discoveries of Ancient Egypt this week. The kids will be asked to pick only five of the discoveries to include in an individual Google Slide project, the five discoveries they believe shed the most light on this ancient civilization. On each slide, kids will pick images to include and a paragraph, written in their own words, about the history of the discovery, the when and where, and then what the discovery told us about Egyptian life that makes it important.
4PA will finish reading the story Broken Arrow Boy early this week followed by a comprehensive discussion about what we learned about the complexity of the human brain as a result. Then, students will begin exploratory research about three different neurological disorders. There is a section on this website for "4PA Neuroscience Links" with all of the information the students will need for this research. Once facts have been gathered and recorded on the form in Google Classroom, each student will pick one of the disorders to use for a project we will be working on until Winter Break.
5PA wore me down, in a good way, with their enthusiasm for creative writing based on a collection of photographs taken under magnification that I shared with the group weeks ago. As I shared the photos, everyone started to think about stories. So, I posted link to a collection of photographs taken over the last 45 years of small life to use as inspiration for a collaborative writing experience. Teams of three selected images for the setting, protagonist, antagonist, problem, and solution which will be used in crafting this tale. Before the kids start writing, they will be working on the back story, what the reader does not know before the story begins, this is called the exposition in literary terms. Good writing begins with knowing the story and characters before the drafting begins.
Sunday, November 15, 2020
No PA Material Pick Up
I do not have materials for PA students to pick up from school this week. My plan is to do as much learning using online resources through winter break to make things easier on the students and Brookdale families. There will likely be a pickup in January with materials for 3rd quarter.
5PA
This week, students will be finishing up their Veldt essays, continuing with Capstone research on how to make the world a better place, and we will be reading a Ray Bradbury short story about a brief summer day on Venus.
4 PA
The 4PA group will continue to learn about how the brain works, what happens when the brain is injured, stories of people who have had brain injuries, and the science behind the most complex organ in our bodies. We will begin a lengthy research project on a neurological disorder after Thanksgiving.
3PA
Third grade will continue to explore life 5,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt this week. I posted the documentary we will continue to watch and discuss this week, showing the top ten discoveries of Ancient Egypt. Do we agree that these are the top ten? Was anything left out? We will be discussing these topics in the weeks to come.
Second Grade TD
This will be the last week of whole group lessons from Mr. Schumann in second grade. My small TD groups will begin after Thanksgiving, but I want to continue to show students how fun a book or story can be, so this week I’m reading Chicken Big by Keith Graves. Books should bring joy!
First Grade TD
This week, we will read a beautiful picture book titled Awake Beautiful Child, a story that follows an ABC pattern throughout the text. After we read the story, students will be writing their own ABC versions inspired by the book.
Kindergarten Math Talent Development
Kindergarten Math Talent Development will focus on thinking about numbers and solving problems together. I will be using picture books, live instruction using my dry erase board, and some video lessons this quarter. Please have a dry erase board and marker ready this week.
Kindergarten Literacy Talent Development
We are going to have fun thinking about books and reading in KTD! This week we will continue to explore the wordless picture books of David Wiesner, a master storyteller! Mr. Wuffles, Tuesday, Sector 7...we have a lot of stories to figure out.
Thursday, November 5, 2020
Talent Development K-2
On Tuesday, Brookdale K-1 Talent Development small groups will begin. The lessons I’ve been teaching to each primary classroom for the last nine weeks have been a lot of fun, but next week my focus will shift to small groups. Classroom teachers will contact the families of the students moving forward with small group K-1 TD through Zoom. Classroom teachers put a lot of thought into these groups using a variety of assessments, and from our ongoing relationships with students.
2nd grade TD will look different this quarter. I’ll be teaching a higher level literacy lesson with each classroom live on Zoom from 10:30-11:00 every week.
PA Progress Reports and Conferences
Progress reports for all 3-5 PA students were mailed today. I will be joining classroom conferences for all of my 3-5th grade students on conference days.
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
PA and TD for the Week of 10-26
Kindergarten and Second grade are going to have a bit of fun to end the quarter using the picture book The Monster Trap. After we read the story together, we are going to design a different kind of monster trap than was created in the book to share. I am excited to see some creative thinking this week!
Monday, October 19, 2020
PA and TD for the Week of 10-19
Kindergarten whole group literacy enrichment will continue this week with a great picture book for October! We will be reading Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds. Last week we met the main character, Jasper Rabbit, in Creepy Pair of Underwear, and this week we will be exploring Jasper's fear of creepy carrots. The kids will also be creating their own frightening fruit!
Monday, October 5, 2020
PA and TD for the Week of 10-5
Kindergarten TD: I continue to meet with whole classes to do enrichment lessons using picture books. This week, we will focus on reading the pictures, using the illustrations to enhance our understanding of characters and story elements. I picked two of my favorites for our time together, Jon Klassen's This is Not my Hat and We Found a Hat.
Monday, September 28, 2020
PA and TD for the Week of 9-28
Kindergarten students this week will be focused on painting their houses to look like their dreams. I'll be reading the picture book The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, a story about a neighborhood where all of the houses look the same until Mr. Plumbean gets a wild idea!
Monday, September 21, 2020
PA for the Week of 9-21
3PA wasn't able to see the short story "Shells" on their Chromebooks because the link was blocked, so we read it together on Monday. The group will still be working in pairs looking for examples of change in different categories on Tuesday. Then, we will be reading a few picture books to find examples of change as a group and the week will end using a novel students will pick from home.
4PA will be discussing the short story we read last week, "The Power of Light" in a whole group Zoom seminar. The kids and I will also be reading a short novel titled The Mozart Question that has many thematic connections to the short story. We will be discussing examples of change and looking for thematic connections as a group.
5PA began thinking of a problem in the world that they would like to find a solution to on Monday, the beginning of their Capstone Project. This week, the students will begin to do some research on the problem, to show that their idea is actually a problem. We will also be looking at a poem by Billy Collins titled "On Turning Ten" about all the things that change when we reach double digits. The week will end with the class writing their own version of the poem that celebrates childhood.
Sunday, September 20, 2020
Monday PA Schedule
It's the first Monday of PA and our schedule is a bit different. This is our Zoom schedule for Monday:
4th 9:30-10:30
5th 11:00-12:00
Monday, September 14, 2020
PA and TD for the Week of 9-15
We had a great opening to our year in PA! Each week, I will be updating our website with the focus for the week, so I won't be sending you a link for Curriculum Night as the classroom teachers will. I also put an active link to our class Zoom meeting on the top right of the PA website for easier access. Here is what what we will be working on this week during our time together.
For K-2, Talent Development small groups will not begin until October, but I am still going into teach whole group lessons with each class.
3PA will begin the week discussing the concept of change. This will be a theme that will run through all of the PA curriculum. What types of things change? How do they change? Can we categorize change into different groups? Once we have a better understanding of change, we will be reading a short story by Cynthia Rylant titled "Shells" that will generate conversations about the idea of change. A link to the text is in Google Classroom.
4PA will review the concept of change and the change generalizations we used last year to begin the week. The kids and I will then be reading the Isaac Singer story "The Power of Light" about two young people in Warsaw during World War II. A link to the text in in Google Classroom along with the matrix.We will use the text to work on the change matrix that I shared with the class.
5PA will finish reading The Collector of Moments and discuss what the theme of the text is and why the author wrote this story. Then, we will begin discussing The Capstone Project which the kids will work on all year. The Capstone Project is all about an idea to make the world a better place. We will start off by examining our passions in life. The idea to make the world a better place will be tied into something your child is passionate about. Lots more come on this in the weeks ahead.
Have a great week!
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
PA for the Week of 9-3
Welcome back! PA will begin on Thursday, day one we will be off and running. Our first two days in 3-5 will be spent discussing the changes to school this year and how we will adapt. The Peter Reynolds book, Ish will be our starting point this year, because we really have school-ish going on. What will school look like and feel like during this ishy year? See you on Zoom! Everyone should have received and email from me with our permanent Zoom link and a Google Classroom code for Thursday.
Friday, July 31, 2020
Monday, May 18, 2020
What Do You Do With a Chance?
Monday, May 4, 2020
Also an Octopus
The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton
Sunday, May 3, 2020
The Imaginaries, Little Scraps of Larger Stories
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Secret Garden Metaphor...
Sunday, April 26, 2020
PA News
3PA: Create a way to share your own personal ranking of the top 10 discoveries of Ancient Egypt. Number 1 should be the most important and 10 is the, while still amazing, the least important on your list. 1-10...create your list and fully explain your choice, 1-10, in any way you want.
4PA: We left off with reading poetry by Langston Hughes, who wrote about life 100 years ago in Harlem, NY in the 1920's. I wanted to take you on a trip through a period of time known as The Harlem Renaissance during our last weeks together. This week, explore this link: http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/interactives/harlem/faces/index.html
We can talk on Thursday about what you can create or share about your thinking.
5PA: Capstone is back, optional, but I know my students want to share their plans to make the world a better place, and it's a good time for big picture problem solving. So kids, basic Mr. Schumann directions, by now I bet you know them already:
- Create a way to share facts from your research, provide evidence, that the problem you want to fix is, in fact, a problem.
- What is your idea to fix the problem.
- Format is your choice.
- Due May 25th, as we discussed on Friday kids. I'm so proud of you guys.
PA for the Week of 1-19-21
There is no Talent Development this week. 3PA will begin reading the novel The Green Book this week. As the kids read this science fictio...

