DeWitt Clinton Elementary School
January 2018 Newsletter
Principal's Message
December was a busy month at Clinton. We ended 2017 celebrating kindness. During our "Choose Kindness" week all classrooms discussed what kindness looks like and how they can be kind in their own lives. We ended the week with each classroom decorating their door showing what kindness means to them.
As usual you will find our monthly Donors Choose project located below. We are excited to announce our December project was fully funded. Ms. Wright and her students will be utilizing their new listening library in the near future.
As a reminder, we encourage alumni to reach out to us for a visit or to schedule a time to talk to our students. It is always wonderful to see former students come back and hear about what they are currently studying or what field they have chosen as a career.
Back in September of 1999, when I was known as Ms. Kanoon, I started at Clinton as a 7th/8th grade teacher. Teaching at Clinton has been one of the most rewarding and gratifying experiences I have had in my career. Working with our middle school students has always had its challenges, but seeing them successfully attend high school and college has been so fulfilling for me as an educator. I am so proud of students who used to sit in my class and are now productive members of society and many of whom are now Clinton School parents!
If you are a Clinton alumnus or alumna please consider coming back to Clinton to share your memories of the past and meet our current students.
Wishing you a happy and healthy new year!
Warmest Wishes,
Maureen Delgado
Principal
January Donors Choose Project : Ms. Zacks - Games for Education! Project
Consider funding our literacy and social science teacher, Elizabeth Zacks, project. Ms. Zacks is a new teacher to Clinton School and quickly become part of the Clinton family. She is always looking for ways to connect literacy and social science while making it relevant to the lives of the 7th grade students she teaches.
Games can help students learn in interactive ways and can help get their brains active in a socially engaging activity. Word games will help our English Language Learning students, financial planning games will help students with financial literacy, our social studies games will help enhance their understandings of the content, and checkers will help them with problem solving.
Many students in our school are unfamiliar with how finances work, and therefore are not set up for success in life. We will be having a unit on financial literacy in which students will be establishing careers and living off of their incomes. Students will need to plan out what expenses they will need to cover, what education level they will need, and what expendable income will be left afterward.
We will explore what factors can lead to debt and how that can negatively impact them in the long term. Students will play financial literacy games to help round out their understanding of how to earn, invest, and save money.
This unit is meant to help students understand the value of education for their future lives. Students will see the difference a college education or vocational education can have on their future success.
In addition to this unit, we are completing a unit with our Fever 1793 books. To culminate this unit, we are planning to have an expert come talk with students about epidemics and how they work. We would like students to play the game Pandemic to help educate them about how diseases can spread.
Click here to donate to this project: https://www.donorschoose.org/project/games-for-education/2959196/
Fully Funded! Ms. Leia Wright's Donors Choose - Classroom Listening Library
Thank you to all the donors who helped to fund Ms. Wright's listening library. Thank you for your generosity and kindness in giving to our students. Ms. Wright cannot wait to receive these materials and use them with her students.In choosing Ms. Wright's project to fund, our donors have investing in our children's future literacy, engagement, and ongoing education.
Curriculum Updates
Preschool
This past month in preschool, we have been focusing on kindness as part of our social emotional curriculum. Our students are working together to make a kindness chain in our classroom. Each time we see students performing acts of kindness, we add another link to the chain to see how quickly we can reach the floor. Students have been excited to help add links to our kindness chain and share acts of kindness they see happening in the classroom.
We also continue to work on literacy skills in our classroom as we learn to write and identify letters. We provide students with many hands-on experiences to practice writing, using materials such as sand, shaving cream, or paint. These types of activities engage the student’s senses as they practice writing and helps them to learn letters and numbers as they write them. One student can be seen below using his finger to write Pre-K in sand. We look forward to continuing our learning when we return from winter break next week!
Kindergarten
Where has all of the time gone? Our little kindergarteners have grown so much emotionally, physically, and academically over the past 4 months. They are learning how to problem solve with friends and how it’s very important to invite others to play. Kindergartners are reading stories and talking about the problem in the story. They are even able to identify the solution of the story and how the character helped find the solution. Kinder kids are working on long vowel sounds, which can be tricky. Did you know that the BOSSY E yells at vowels and says “Hey vowel! You say your name?”
In math we are working on addition. Students love their new friend Gus the Plus who helps join small numbers together. Kindergarten students love playing math games and are enjoying math centers very much. In science we are learning about materials around us. We are learning about the different kinds of wood and how recycling saves trees. We also just visited the Field Museum and students were in awe of all the ancient artifacts. Sue the T-Rex was a kindergarten favorite and students e to guess how many bones she had.
3rd Grade
December was an exciting month of learning for third graders!
In reading, they have been working on identifying cause and effect, as well as main idea, in order to make sense of the text. They are looking forward to starting the next unit on traditional literature! Third grade writers have been busy with informational writing in which they picked their own topics of interest and researched them.
In math, students have been exploring what it means to divide and the different strategies to divide. They are understanding that multiplication and division are inverse operations.
In science, the focus has been on structures of life- some third graders wrapped up their learning about human bones, and others studied about some amazing animal adaptations.
As part of our schoolwide SEL initiative, third graders were excited to participate in the door decorating contest and spent a lot of time throughout the month, discussing ways to show kindness all around us. Congratulations to the winning classroom- 205!
4th Grade
Happy New Year! We hope that you are enjoying quality time with your families. We look forward to continuing working with you and supporting our students.
During December, students worked on fractions, multiples, and patterns. Students engaged in solving and creating their word problems. In science, students continued working on electromagnets and began investigating kinetic energy and potential energy. Students used steel spheres, ramps, and corks to study what happens when objects collide.
Readers in fourth grade have been focused on determining main idea, theme, and supporting details. Students have been practicing interpreting their supporting information and referring back to the text for support. Students are working in small groups to build reading stamina and comprehension with guided reading. In writing, students are finishing up their narrative writing and getting familiar with the final draft process.
5th & 6th Grade
Literacy & Social Science - We had a busy December in 5th & 6th grade! In social studies, 5th grade continues to learn about the age of exploration and debate the ethics of colonization in the Americas. 6th grade is unlocking the commonalities shared by ancient societies. We enjoyed the opportunity to experience exhibits relevant to our studies at the Field Museum. We are excited to integrate our skills learned from our informational reading and writing units, when we create our history fair projects this winter. In Literacy, we are wrapping up current units of study with culminating projects and assessments. In writing, students continue to use their reading texts used as mentor texts to model great writing. We look forward to seeing their continued growth this winter!
Science & Math - 5th and 6th grade Math and science is going strong! In 5th grade, we are beginning to master fractions using our new favorite tools: fraction talks and quizizz! In science, we are exploring how radiation and energy transfer affect the earth around us. We have also had been working with Ms. Jaimes’ Kindergarten and helped the students practice writing their numbers in the teens! In 6th grade we have mastered two step equations and inequalities, and began applying our understanding to real world topics like income inequality in various countries. In science we are exploring how society determines the value and uses land by studying erosion and deposition. We have modeled both rivers and hills, and are pushing forward to model cliff erosion to determine pros and cons of each site.
7th & 8th Grade
7th Grade Literacy and Social Studies:
Our literacy and social sciences have seen a much more robust integration in the past month as we completed our historical fiction novel, Fever 1793. Students have begun researching and composing their own historical fiction stories integrating the elements of Lucy Calkins Writers Workshop previously learned including character development and building in obstacles.
We continue to forge through United States history as we explore the time period surrounding 1793 including the Revolutionary War and the formation of the new nation. Students will begin examining the divergence of the multiple political parties, the fights between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, and the debates for state's rights versus a strong central government. We will also examine how this fight persists today.
Library Program
Students continued to enjoy library visits throughout December, with interest in the Readers' Choice Awards continuing to build. Several students have now read enough books to participate in the annual contest, and many others are very close. Primary grades enjoyed read-alouds that allowed us to explore different sections of the library, fiction vs. non-fiction, fact vs. opinion, and more. On December 4, the children's librarian from the Northtown branch library visited all 5 kindergarten classrooms to deliver more than 90 Chicago Public Library cards to students who applied, as well as to share a favorite story. Classes in several grades also took advantage of library resources to conduct research on a range of topics, from animals in 1st grade to historical eras for fiction writing in 7th grade. Finally, the Battle of the Books team finished reading and analyzing their first round of books and eagerly moved on to the next. We are looking forward to great things to come in January, including new resources to support upcoming History Fair research and more.
Music Education
As the 2nd quarter winds down, 6th and 7th graders will look at what they have learned since the school year started and begin to compile it into cumulative projects. The 8th graders will begin to look at music that will possibly be sung at graduation!
Our 5th and 6th grade students had their concert on December 4th featuring songs from "Festivals" around the world. This went very well! Thank you to all the family and friends who attended!
Our 3rd and 4th graders are preparing their songs for their upcoming concert titled, “Peace, Love, Friendship and Harmony”. This concert will feature songs by Bruno Mars, Ben E. King and more! We hope to see you at this concert!
Thank you for supporting our music program!
English Language Learner (ELL) Program
Our English Learners had a wonderful December leading up to the winter break. In early December, our newcomer classes in 4th through 8th grade took a field trip to see DePaul’s basketball team compete against Loyola. In late December all of our students brainstormed and then executed plans to decorate classroom doors with the theme of “choosing kindness.” In the process, students had conversations in their classes about how to show kindness to others. Many of the results were quite stunning!
In January, students will continue to push ahead in their classes. We also will be preparing for the ACCESS test, which is a state-mandated test for all English Language Learners to take, and which will begin in mid-late January. This test will help educators to identify students’ proficiency levels in reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and will help us differentiate to meet students’ needs!
Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
SEL
Every week, students in grades pre-K-8 have time built-in for Social and Emotional Learning, with teachers utilizing the Second Step curriculum-a program that focuses on social skills and academic success. During this current unit, students are learning about accepting differences and showing compassion.
SEL at Home:
Children, at very young ages, are often aware and honest about differences they observe between themselves and others, but rarely attach judgments to those observations. Adults are the ones that do that. Celebrating differences does not mean putting your heritage aside. You can teach your child to be proud of their heritage while learning about the new ideas and experiences that other cultures bring.
1. Look at the way you speak to and treat others. Does it reflect tolerance and compassion?
2. Answer your kid's questions respectfully and honestly.
3. Choose programs, movies, stories and games where diversity is present and valued.
4. Learn about the traditions of other cultures.
Success At School
Clinton school offers great opportunities for learning about diversity and appreciating differences. This is an essential skill to have a successful future, where children will need to be able to work with others.
DeWitt Clinton Elementary School
Website: Clinton.cps.edu
Location: 6110 North Fairfield Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States
Phone: (773)534-2025
Facebook: facebook.com/cpsclinton