I hope to finish this post quick so that I can publish it!
This week was full of great work and lots of feelings. The kids were excited about picture day and when the eight grade buddies came on Wednesday. And we were all having sad feelings about Tennacee moving to Virginia. Friday was her last day and she will be missed. She is someone who offers to help anytime anyone needs it, so she was a valuable member of our community. I wanted to let you know of this, just in case your child shares their feelings, or is acting a little off. We all go through saying goodbye to people throughout our lives. This may be the perfect time to discuss how we deal with or work through these feelings.
Next week we will be doing some cool things that the students are excited about. This week we looked at two of our brainstorms, the name for our group and the name for our baby fish. We distilled these down to three or four main choices. The group voted to find the main choices for the fish name, but for the group name we had a subtly different process. The students started noticing key words that they liked and that were in many of the suggested names, for instance Brainstormers, Solvers and Adventurous. ( Pretty cool words to identify yourself with!) Together they came up with the four options we are voting between. So next week we will vote and agree on these two important items!
We will also be going on our first field trip next week, on Thursday! Monday we look forward to everyone turning in their money for the trip. We do have enough family members going on the trip, but we could use more drivers, or we may chose to have you drop off at the bus stop that day instead... I will email you about this. Check your prior emails for all the details.
But the real reason we are going on this particular trip is to check out all the signs across the city. Thank you so much to all the families who have sent me images of signs this last week! I can't wait to show them to the kids on Tuesday! We will discuss each and generate a list of key themes or ideas that make a sign work. Here are some questions to think about:
What makes an effective sign?
What elements are universal in signs?
What symbols do we consistently see in signs?
What do we notice about the text in signs?
The students often want to create their own signs to communicate with the students from other classes on campus, so this research will help us to step up our creations. With each sign we make the students try to answer three questions to help formulate their plan:
Why are you making your sign?
What is your sign’s message?
What symbols or illustrations will you use on your sign?
This work is important to the students because they want to organize things and are hoping to make agreements that everyone can uphold about the care of our school environment. I am excited to see how our field trip helps us to think about the signs we want to create. I also can't wait to get to go on all the different types of transportation! I wonder how many students will be having their first boat experience on Thursday?
Well, I hope you are enjoying your weekend. I loved the rain and now the sun. See you soon!
Love, Jennifer
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