Our Sense of Community

We are working really hard to build our sense of community in room 306.  Our morning meetings are spent doing a wide variety of things, but my favorite thing is learning about one another.  Our favorite foods, places we love, people we look up to…all things we talk about (and more, of course).  It brings us closer together.  When we learn new things about one another, we find new friends, new people to connect with and our community gets stronger. 

I am so proud of our community.

The Wonder of Wonder

What an amazing piece of literature.  R.J. Palacio has written such a wonderful story and it captures kids from the very first words written.  The conversations that we have surrounding this book are truly WONDERful.  Your kids are thoughtful and are completely outraged by how Auggie is treated.  We are beginning to delve into POINT OF VIEW and how others see the same situation.  It’s such an interesting way to tell a story and I love hearing the conversations regarding the differences in how people perceive the same events in the story.    

Questions you can ask your child about Wonder:

•  What is Auggie like?  Would you like to be his friend?  Why or why not?

•  Why do you think Julian is mean to Auggie?

•  They don’t give full details about how Auggie looks.  Describe what YOU think he looks like.

•  What do you think about the line ‘Don’t judge a boy by his face’?  What do you think it means?

•  What do you have in common with Auggie? 

•  What is a PRECEPT? 

The Ecology Center Visits Room 306

What a fun way to spend part of our Friday afternoon!  They taught us all about composting.  What it is, the kind of materials that can be composted, and the perfect “recipe” for a good compost pile.  They dug through piles of dirt to find red worms and what could be found in a compost pile.  So.  Fun.  The presenters told me they had never had such thought provoking questions from a group of fourth graders.  How great is THAT!?  They asked about global warming, the best things to put into a compost pile, and offered suggestions about how to stop useless waste.  Here are some vocabulary words we learned about:  compost, decompose, decomposers, landfill, and nutrients.  BRAVO!! 

Poetry – Alliteration

When I was a kid, I didn’t like poetry until I heard Shel Silverstein.  As soon as I heard his poems, I was hooked.  I spend a lot of time trying to hook your kids on poetry.  They seem pretty hooked.  They are coming up with a lot of amazing stuff on Poetry Fridays.  We pushed our alliteration knowledge a little farther on Friday.  Sure, it’s about poems using words with the same letter, but it’s MORE than that.  It’s about words using the same sounds.  Knife.  Gnaw.  Nope.  We looked at a lot of examples, used dictionaries, rhyming dictionaries, and working together.  They can choose to read their poems, and more and more of them are choosing to do so.  I love the teams who work together – they change a lot, and the poems they come up with are reallllllly good!  YahOoOo!