Back to School and our many interests...

Hello Families!

Thank you so much for making our Back to School afternoon so nice.  It was great to see the kids explaining the different parts of the day as they watched the slide show, showing their work to their parents and also telling their parents who all the students are in our class.  These kids have so many great ideas and are already becoming a lovely group of people who are so willing to help and collaborate.  I feel like they are going to make this a fabulous year!

Today we had a rainy morning.  This may be why we had so few friends come to school.  With only 13 friends here today, we made the day a little different.  We took the time to begin learning other skills, kind of like a club day.  Friends voted on what they wanted to start first (sewing, wire or watercolor) and sewing won. 

Today's activities included:

Identifying the parts of how a pie graph works.
What can color do to give information?
What information does the circle tell us?

The math challenge: making new ones and solving old ones. 
How do you write an equation? What are the parts? What makes it readable?
What strategies did you use to solve the math challenge you chose?

Following directions and identifying directionality through sewing.
What side is the thread on?  What length do you want your stitch to be and how do you make this happen?
How much thread do you have left, is it long enough for your next stitch?

Surveys: defining your questions and how using tallies effectively.

Adding to yesterday's journal entries on horses, sharing thoughts, knowledge or questions.
What are key words that go with our agreed upon topic?
What are the writing norms we need to follow so others can read our work?

Remember, our school policy about "no meaningful homework" is partly because we believe family time is important.  So if you find doing these activities at home is making life stressed, that is not what we wish for. We always hope learning will be fun and we wish you lots of important family connection time, so please make your homework decisions according to what works best for you as a family!

If your child is interested in homework, or likes to extend these activities at home, then these are great ideas to get you started. The children have also been creating -er and -ing poems and many say they'd like to do this also. So many ideas!


I hope you are have a lovely weekend!  Thank you for sharing your creative thinkers with me!  Love, Jennifer