Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Happy 2012!

Hello families!

I hope you had a lovely holiday break.  I did.  Lots of knitting, sunsets, exploring SD, visiting with family, reading  baking and eating!  Here's a glimpse from my break.






 Cabrillo National Monument








We spent time before the break reflecting on our accomplishments and then planning for this year.  Here are the two lists that we made.  It was so neat to hear how proud the students were and also how honest they are about where they are in their abilities and how it's not a bad thing, just a work in progress.  I'm so lucky to be able to work with such reflective people!


Today was a lovely first day back.  It is so nice to be around such caring individuals!  We welcomed Ryan, one of our new friends, and tomorrow we will have Nathaniel join us.   We had game day this morning where each group got to do a language and a math activity.  The class is taking on more challenging tasks and adding their own creativity.  Ask your child what games they played and how to play.

With our new songs and poems comes more words to study and memorize their spelling.  A few friends shared words they practiced over the break and many committed to memorizing a new word tonight.  It is great when a student chooses a word that they use often or that will help them in what they want to write at that moment.  This makes the word more meaningful and has a greater possibility then of sticking in their brain for next time.  We have started to collect the words they know in a file so others can use this as a sort of spelling dictionary.  I can't wait to hear what your child chooses to memorize and use in their writing next!

This afternoon we read the book, "Snowflake Bentley" about a man who investigated and photographed snowflakes in the 1800s.  It was very interesting to the students.  After reading the first half of the book, we journaled about what we were interested in about the book, our thoughts or questions we had or just about Mr Bentley himself.  Here are some journal entries and also images of some of the students reading their work to their peers.  We are excited to look into this more!












Have a lovely night!  Love, Jennifer

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