3rd and 4th Grade Materials Pick-up

3PA and 4PA will have materials to pick up available on Thursday the 14th from 9:30-4:00 and on Friday the 15th from 9:00-4:00. I will have two novels for 3PA, The Green Book and The Girl Who Owned a City. 4PA will have a copy of The Secret Garden to pick up. They will be inside Door 1, the main office door, with a sign above for 3PA and 4PA. Many of the books are not school property, they are books I purchased, so please be gentle. 

PA and TD for the Week of 1-11

 Talent Development will be pausing after this Friday, along with all of our academic interventions, as we transition into hybrid instruction.  The academic support team will be working on individual assessments and helping classroom teachers complete one one one assessments we have missed during remote learning. All interventions and TD will resume on 2-10, but groups will have some new students and some students will be rotating back to their classrooms. 

KTD Lit: We will finish our author study of David Wiesner this week as a whole group on Wednesday. I have a substitute on Tuesday and I didn't want to miss our final discussion, so the Tuesday kids will join the Wednesday kids for a whole group wrap-up of our wordless picture book study.

KTD Math: We will be working another estimation problem this week.  It takes stamina to work on one problem for 30 minutes, but the groups have done very well!

1TD: The group will finish reading Frog and Toad are Friends during our time together this week.  The focus of our discussion will be how the differences between Frog and Toad make the story more engaging for the reader. Authors use juxtaposition to contrast characters all the time, but how does this make a story more interesting? 

2TD: We ended up spending two hours reading Rooted in Justice about Vice President Elect Kamala Harris last week.  The group took detailed notes on the experiences Kamala had in her life that will help her in her new job. This week, we will be reading about President Elect Joe Biden and looking into his past experiences and how they will shape him as a leader.  On Friday, we will see how these two people with very different experiences, might be able to use those experiences to make good decisions for America. 

3PA: This week, we will be building background information for the first novel we will read together this year. I'm not giving the title of the novel yet because I know this crowd! The students will be working alone and in pairs to start the week with a lunar survival problem. If your spacecraft is trapped on the light side of the moon, waiting for a rescue, what items from the spaceship would be most important? I have a list of 15 items that kids will number rank and defend their rank in writing. Next students will work in pairs to collaborate on their list and compromise on a new list taking in ideas from both partners. After we discuss as a whole group, students will be reading and discussing the five articles that I put into Google Classroom this morning. 

4PA: Kids will, hopefully, finish their neurological disorder slides this week, write the speech, and be ready to present after MLK Day.

5PA: The kids have all week to work on their TED Talk on a young person who made their community a better place. I uploaded a sample outline and a TED Talk speaker guide, the same one given to anyone giving a TED Talk, to Google Classroom this morning.  

TD and PA for the Week of 1-4

 Welcome back! I am looking forward to a much better year in 20201.  Here is what we will be working on this week.

KTD Lit will continue developing story sense, understanding of story elements, and critical thinking skills with another Caldecott Medal winner, Flotsam, by David Wiesner.  There are a lot of connections to the other books we have read together.  The conversations about how he mixes his stories together have been great and I trust they will continue this week.     

KTD Math began learning about estimation before our break.  This week, we will be working on two different video estimation problems that encourage deeper mathematical thinking with addition and subtraction.

1TD will dive into the world created by Arnold Lobel that belongs to Frog and Toad. The students and I will discuss the literary term of juxtaposition, how differences in characters can create a richer story. We will be reading a digital copy of Frog and Toad are Friends and discussing how differences make stories more interesting to read.

2TD will be reading two picture books this week about our future president and vice president.  Our focus will be centered on how similarities and differences can make a team stronger, in any setting. What similarities and differences can be found in their upbringings, experiences, their family lives, and anything else the group uncovers. 

3PA will start the year off playing with language.  We will be learning about palindromes and anagrams as we explore two picture books, Ann and Nan the Anagrams and Mom and Dad are Palindromes, Kids will be working on teams to create their own palindromes and anagrams without using the internet!

4PA will begin creating their slide show to serve as a background for the presentation on the neurological disorder that we were working on before break.  The goal of the presentation is to tell a story, not list facts. The kids will be creating a character that is an amalgamation of stories read about people who have the disorder being researched.  I will share a few of the presentations former students have created as a guide, along with the rubric everyone has in Google Classroom. 

5PA begins the year acting as the school board disciplinary panel for the school district on Venus where Margot was locked on a closet in the Bradbury short story, "All Summer in One Day." Teams of kids will gather the evidence pertaining to the event, make an informed decision about possible disciplinary action, and defend their choices. I will also be sharing the stories teams wrote before break in Google Classroom for all of the kids to read as homework Monday-Wednesday. On Thursday we will discuss the stories, seminar style, and then begin a mini-TED Talk about a young person making a difference in the world.

Stay tuned for PA materials pick-up, and what TD will look like in the hybrid model.