Saturday, February 27, 2021
Friday, February 5, 2021
PA for the Week of 2-10
3PA will focus on chapters 5 and 6 of The Green Book this week. How will the colonists survive if their crops fail and have crystalline elements absorbed from the soil? What will the moth people do to the residents of Shine? We will finish reading the book this week!
4PA is enjoying The Secret Garden! The small group discussions about symbolism and metaphors have been fun to listen in on over Zoom. This week I anticipate reading chapters 8-11, continuing our work with the characters and figurative language, and we will finally find out where the sound Mary keeps hearing is coming from.
5PA spent last week working on their Capstone and conferencing with me about the direction of their projects. There are some really interesting topics being explored and the kids are all doing well as they continue their passion project. This week, we will work on Capstone just on Thursday as we circle back to the inaugural poetry we were reading. Teams of kids will extract the themes from the three poems and what the poems say about the times they were written in, and then we will discuss their thoughts as a whole group. Later in the week, we will begin reading a short story titled "Ghost Cat" that I have in our Google classroom.
Talent Development for the Week of 2-1
I am excited to get TD going again, and this time with a few live children with me in my classroom. This will be my first time doing a combination of students in the room and students over Zoom. I have no idea how its going to go, but we have all learned to adapt during the pandemic, and I'm sure we will get the hang of it eventually.
Kindergarten Literacy will meet on Tuesday and Wednesday from 10:00-10:30. If your child is going to be in school on Tuesday, they will need their Chrome Book for accessing digital resources. This week we will be reading two Caldecott winning picture books with a lot of snow. In Owl Moon we will try to identify the main idea and discuss what we learned about the two characters in this quiet, peaceful story. We will also read a true story about the first person to photograph snowflakes in Snowflake Bentley. The kids and I will discuss the differences between the two types of picture books when we have read both.
Kindergarten Math will meet on Thursday and Friday from 10:00-10:30. There are many kids who are in both the literacy and the math group, so I'm going to do a bit of a crossover lesson using the snowflake photography of W. A. Bentley. We are going to look at the geometry of snowflakes, identify different shapes, and make our own snowflake drawings. 
First Grade Talent Development will meet from 10:30-11:00. The first grade team and I split TD into two groups that will meet on Tuesday/Wednesday or Thursday and Friday. The students who are in school will come to my room and meet their classmates on Zoom. This week we will be learning about an inspiring individual, a theme for first grade this quarter, Sonia Sotomayor. Kids at home will have access to a digital copy of the text and the kids at school will have the actual book. We will focus on the key moments in Justice Sotomayor's life and why she is seen as an inspiring person. You can see an interview with her about this book in the clip I posted on the website.
Second Grade Talent Development will be seeing me Tuesday-Friday from 11:00-11:30. We will be doing a combination of in person learning and Zoom, so some kids will be in my room and others will be joining on their computers. The second grade teachers gave copies of the novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to all TD students. If your child does not have a copy of the book yet, please come by school and pick one up. I put a few extras inside the main door of school on Friday morning. I was able to find a link to a complete copy of the text that I have under the "student resources" tab on this website that the kids can use until they have the book. We will begin reading this week and recording character traits for the main characters as we discuss this classic of children's literature.
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
PA for the Week of 2-1
3PA will be continuing to read The Green Book during class this week. Last week, we spent time finding details about the setting on this new planet and how authors use words to paint a picture in the mind of a reader. The kids turned those details into a drawing showing what their "Shine" looked in their minds. This week we will continue to write a first person journal from Pattie's point of view and discuss some of the plans the colonists are making.
4PA will be reading The Secret Garden this week. The layers in the story are just beginning to unfold. Our main focus will be identifying symbolism and metaphors as we discover them in our reading. The kids will also continue to add notes to the character matrix that we began last week.
5PA will be working on Capstone all week as the kids pivot to developing a solution for their passion project. We spent the first half of the year finding information on the problem itself, proving that it is a problem. Now, the students will begin researching different possible solutions and finding out what is currently being done to try to solve the problem. I will be meeting with each student in a breakout room to check in to make sure everyone is still on the right path.
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