I hope you are all enjoying your weekend. This week we finished our work with the artists in residence and also had a visit form Sue Minter's campaign. David Goodman, Sue's husband, visited our classroom on Tuesday. He talked to the kids about why Sue wants to be governor and what she would do for kids. We are hoping to have Phill Scott's campaign in sometime in the next few weeks (they are working on it). In science, the students continued to look at how animals adapt, and explored the ideas of adaptation through the 4 categories that we identified last week.
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| Posing for a picture with David Goodman (of the Minter Campaign) |
The PLAYOFFS have started! Yes the baseball playoffs have started and it has become a focus in our classroom. Well, sort of . . . On Thursday, the students worked individually or in teams to pick their teams for this year's baseball playoffs. Although some of the students don;t even know who the teams are, they seemed to be psyched. I will use this competition to create a few graphing lessons for the class. We will see who ends up becoming the champion of the class.
It was certainly a quick week that had me out of the class.room for a conference on Wednesday and a meeting on Thursday. Please know that I am very selective about attending conferences, during the school year, because I don't like being away from my class. However, from time to time there are presentations that I feel are worth attending. On Wednesday I attended a conference on Social Emotional Engagement. Below is a quick description of the presentation that I attended. Social Emotional Engagement represents the “fuel for learning” in the classroom setting. School communities with knowledge of a social and emotional scope and sequence of skills and how to facilitate student growth in these domains can create a school climate that is focused on the success of every student. The outcomes of the Social Emotional Engagement – Knowledge and Skills (SEE-KS) program are focused on fostering social emotional engagement, presenting information in multiple ways, and promoting student participation. SEE-KS can be used for collaboration across teaching staff as a sustainable means to increase student initiations, independence, and emotional investment in classroom lessons. Research in the neuroscience of social emotional engagement fosters our ability to support children with social, emotional and communication challenges while supporting a universal design for learning for all. If you would like to read more about this, check out the following presentation. I was out of the building on Thursday afternoon so that I could attend the district leadership committee meeting (that I am a member of). This year, my schedule is set up so that the class has a majority of their specials, while I am out. This way I only miss a half hour of teaching time. I was very pleased that this worked out this way!
NOTES:
*The parent volunteers will start this week. Please check the volunteer schedule (located on the right side of the blog page) to see the schedule.
*Due to the short week, I will not publish a video. Look for a new one next week.
*Since we did not have school on Friday, your child did not write in their Weekly News Journals.
I hope you have a great weekend.
Peace,
Tommy
