Pine Class News
Week of October 16
"Well, I think if Owen was here he would know the answer, because he knows a lot about history." - Georgia
This comment was so, so beautiful to me. I hope this will interest more than just Owen's and Georgia's parents ...
So, we often play a math game called "Pico, Fermi, Nada" (give it a try at home!) at the end of a clean up time. It helps us recenter after working and cleaning up, and it helps us come together as a group with a common goal. On Friday, I decided to make the number a year, 2008, and then, at the conclusion of the game, ask the children, "What important event happened in this year?" (Obama was elected as our first black president.) It was this context that set up the kind words that Georgia spoke. Of course, long before she spoke up, Georgia was also doing something incredibly kind - she was paying attention to another person, noticing what he likes and what he's good at.
I think I'm getting sappy about this, not because it's a happy exception to people saying unkind things to each other, but rather, because we just don't speak the kind things often enough.
I think we can all learn a little bit about affirmation from Georgia. This week, we will encourage the children to pay attention to the everyday gifts others are sharing, and we'll encourage them to speak acknowledgment and appreciation of these talents. Please join us.
This week we ...
- interviewed author Emily Jenkins
- discussed how to determine and how to express the main idea of short nonfiction passages (paragraphs, pages, short sections)
- read a Jazz at Lincoln Center resource guide to help us get more out of Friday's concert, and to practice our main idea thinking skills
- used drawings to represent place value concepts and apply understanding of place value to subtraction problems requiring "regrouping"
- learned to make symmetrical shapes with a dance partner from Luke, our Mark Morris Dance Company instructor
- used a writing rubric to help us reflect on the use of writer's notebooks and to make goals for our upcoming informational writing study
- each child began writing about his or her own culture