I hope you are all enjoying your weekend. This past week was wonderful and your children have been rockstars with their work. I want to start with their Weekly Highlight writing that are hung up at the end of the hall, near our classroom. The entries this week are full of detail and many of the students felt great about their writing. If you have time before or after your parent conference this week, I strongly urge you to take a look at these. What I like about this bulletin board is each entry, for each child, is displayed from newest to oldest You can see how much their writing has progressed since the start fo the year.
We have also started our narrative writing unit. The writings are also called small moment stories. Your child is being asked to think of their stories as a Watermelon. From that watermelon they are asked to think about one slice of it and then about the seed in that slice. The seed they think about is the small moment that will drive their story (see graphic to the right). As you can see by the graphic, this organizational approach helps students with finding a focus that is not too big and also helps them do some prewriting before they try and start their story. I will show you an example, from your child's writing, at parent conferences. 
We also discussed the logical consequence of using our words to offer an apology. It is not your typical, say I am sorry and move on. The student speaks to the "offender" directly and tells them how he/she feels and that he/she would like him/her to stop. The "offender" then apologizes and lets the other student what he/she will do next time (see chart on right). I use this because of its effectiveness when introduced, modeled, and executed in an effective way. I also like how it teaches students to let others know how they feel about actions that are being directed toward or at them. On Wednesday, we continued looking at maps, Papa Steve's travels, and introduced the directional points of north, south, east, and west. We found these directional points as it relates to our classroom and a map of Vermont. Then we used Resort Maps of Waitsfield to find these markings and looked found different points of interest on the map. The students used the maps to identify points of interests based on location from the school. We will continue to look at maps in both social studies and science.
Parent Conferences will be on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. Please plan on having your child attend the first part of the conference. I will use this time to set a goal for him/her. The 2nd part will be for us to talk about the start of their year, some examples of their work, and anything else you may want to discuss. Please make sure you are on time for your conference.
That is all for now. I hope you all have a great Sunday.
Peace,
Tommy
