Cool Cat News
Principal Brief
October 30 - Nov.3
Cool Cats,
Diane and I will be traveling to D.C and are excited to bring back our Blue Ribbon Flag to hang loud and proud! This reminder outside of our school is significant. It is a symbol of many years of hard work from teachers and students. It shows that we expect the best of ourselves and others. It displays the message that Cool Cats have grit and continue to strive to be the best of the best.
Doug and I are planning to leave on Friday and explore D.C. over the weekend before our scheduled events that start Monday. During this time I will be posting on our Hartman Facebook page with Live Video. Please take time to show these short clips to your students and share on your class facebook pages. I want students to see and feel the significance of the National Blue Ribbon Achievement and explore a little bit of D.C with me! Think of it as a virtual field trip!
The luncheon and award ceremony will take place Tuesday, November 7th 11:30-3:30pm and will be live streamed for those not in attendance. The link is:
https://player.cloud.wowza.com/hosted/np5lsnby/player.html
I am not sure of the time frame when we will be announced - but you might want to check it out. Students and staff need to wear their BR shirts on 11/7.
We will be providing lunch for the staff on Tuesday, 11/7 in honor of officially receiving our flag!
Thanks for your hard work and dedication!
Shawna
#hartmanpride #proudprincipal
Upcoming Dates:
11/6 Shawna and Diane are in D.C. Please check the Hartman fb page and show your students the live facebook feed that I posted over the weekend.
11/7 Shawna and Diane are in D.C. Lunch is provided for staff. Staff and students wear BR shirts.
11/8 Staff Meeting in the Cafeteria 3-3:45pm
11/9 8:15 Veterans Day Breakfast for our Veterans, Pop Choir Veterans Day Concert at 9am and 7pm, PTA Board Meeting 6pm,
11/10 AED Crisis Team Drill, Thanksgiving lunch (Let your parents know!)
11/13 McDonalds Night 5-7pm (G3)
11/14 Sunshine Committee Meeting 3pm, Spaghetti Dinner 5-7pm, PTA Cookie Dough Fundraiser pickup,
11/15 RTI Team Meeting
11/16 Fall Picture Retakes, UIL Competition @ Watkins 4pm, Awards @ WEHS @7pm
11/17 Sunshine "We're so thankful for YOU" day, Famous Cats Pep Rally (G1) @ 7:50am- Staff and students dress like a famous cat. Thanks first grade for coming up with a great theme for the pep rally!
A great article on manipulatives and how best to use them! Interesting!
Daniel Willingham’s Cautionary Notes on Manipulatives
“Research in the last few decades has complicated our view of manipulatives,” says Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) in this article in American Educator. “Yes, they often help children understand complex ideas. But their effectiveness depends on the nature of the manipulative and how the teacher encourages its use. When these are not handled in the right way, manipulatives can actually make it harder for children to learn.”
Willingham says recent research has shown that two prominent theories that supported the use of manipulatives have been proven wrong, while a third theory is likely correct, but comes with caveats.
• Debunked theory #1: Young children need to learn via concrete objects. Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget believed that children went through a concrete operations stage from 7-12, learning by manipulating physical objects, and then became proficient at abstract reasoning around age 12. But researchers have found that young children are capable of abstract mathematical and scientific thinking. “When counting,” says Willingham, “they assign one numeric tag to each item in a set, they use the same tags in the same order each time, they claim that the last tag used is the number of items in the set, and they apply these rules to varied sets of objects.” Young children can also understand categories (like living things), so it’s not true that their thinking needs to be tethered to specific objects (a cow).
• Debunked theory #2: Physical movement is central to thought. According to this theory, there’s a difference between learning the word kick and actually kicking a ball, and the latter is better for learning the word. But research with computer-based simulations of vocabulary learning has shown that physical movement isn’t essential. “These findings don’t mean that movement is completely unrelated to cognition,” says Willingham, “but they make it doubtful that movement underpins the efficacy of manipulatives.”
• A plausible theory: Manipulatives help children understand and remember new concepts by serving as analogies to familiar ideas. “Manipulatives are used so often in math and science,” says Willingham, “exactly because those subjects are rife with unintuitive concepts like number, place value, and velocity.” Slicing a pizza into eight parts links to a child’s experiences and uses the pieces as a metaphor for the abstract idea of fractions. “The data that posed a problem for other theories are no problem here,” Willingham argues. “This theory doesn’t predict that children can’t think abstractly, and it doesn’t accord any specific role to moving the body. Indeed, this theory sits comfortably with other studies showing that embedding problems in familiar situations helps students, even if there is nothing to manipulate physically or virtually.”
Now we’re moving in the right direction, he says, but there are three important considerations for getting the biggest instructional bang for the buck from manipulatives:
• Don’t under-manage or over-manage. “When children are given little guidance in the hope that they will, in the course of loosely structured exploration, discover key concepts in math and science, outcomes are usually disappointing,” says Willingham, “compared with situations using more explicit instruction.” But if teachers lead children through every step, doing too much for them, learning will fall short.
• Manipulatives can be confusing if they remind children of irrelevant information. For example, using toy animals as counters makes children think of toys to be played with, distracting them from the desired analogy. Using a pie to teach fractions triggers memories of eating a pie and makes the manipulative less effective for teaching the meaning of slices. Using Cuisenaire rods with action figures painted on them distracts from comparing the length of the different rods. “Thinking of an object as having two meanings overwhelms working memory in young children,” says Willingham. “[M]anipulatives that are perceptually rich draw attention to themselves…” Teachers need to focus children’s attention on the relevant features, which usually means keeping manipulatives simple (popsicle sticks) and not freighted with other associations.
• Transfer is the ultimate objective, and it won’t happen by itself. Students need to outgrow manipulatives as they move up through the grades. “We expect using pizza manipulatives will give students the conceptual understanding of fractions that they will then transfer to the symbolic representation,” says Willingham, “so they won’t need a manipulative for a fraction with a denominator of 10,000. We expect that the conceptual knowledge will successfully apply to other concrete representations, like calculating how many books can fit on a bookshelf. Alas, it’s not so simple.”
The most worrisome finding in recent research is that students who seem to be doing best using manipulatives are least proficient at applying what they’ve “learned” in a new, less concrete situation. Students often don’t make the connection; proficiency with manipulatives stays mentally separate from symbolic representation. Willingham suggests two ways of addressing this challenge:
- Concreteness fading – The teacher introduces a concept with a perceptually rich manipulative (stuffed animals for number concepts) and then moves to animal stickers, then plain circular stickers, and then square blocks forming a number line.
- Consistency – “It’s tempting for a teacher to use stickers as counters one day, Cheerios another, and so on,” says Willingham. “It adds some variety and would, it would seem, boost student engagement.” But using a consistent physical analogy may be more effective, reducing the memory load for students and allowing them to benefit fully from their previous work.
R- Time Every Wednesday!
Rtime for Better Relationships! 10 minutes every Wednesday!
- Show good manners and respect at all times.
- Care for everyone and everything.
- Follow instructions with thought and care.