February 2002 News and Notes

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Will They Be Prepared?

The world is changing very rapidly. The children in our elementary schools today will face a world that will expect them to be ready. We must ask ourselves, "What will they face?" and "Will they be prepared?" Schools of today must constantly keep their eyes on the future and understand that even though their students are very young, preparing them for the future begins as soon as they enter school. In the book, The Future Is Now, James Spady and Chuck Schwan have examined major trends and their implications on education. They have identified several trends that must be considered when educating our students. Future learners face:

1. A high quality, global marketplace. This means that high quality will be demanded in every business or service or product. Therefore, we must teach our youngsters that they must always strive for excellence and produce their highest quality work.

2. Technology will affect and redefine every aspect of life and living. Universal access to the Internet will make machines and tools interactive, and they will be able to do increasingly sophisticated tasks. Already someone working in one country can control machines in another country. Workers must have the ability to use high level thinking and know how to effectively use this technology. Therefore, our students must be taught how to use the technology available to them and know how to utilize vast amounts of information to meet their needs. They must be creative and critical thinkers.

3. Empowered employees in organizations capable of foreseeing the future and making the necessary changes will be successful. Thinkers who are adept at changing will move with these organizations. Therefore, our students must be taught skills, such as creative problem solving, flexibility and forecasting. They must be able to change as the world changes.

4. The “virtual workplace” will become common. Communication will be via the Internet, and short term work alliances will accomplish projects. Students of today must learn how to work alone as well as work well with others. They must learn how to communicate effectively, either verbally or in writing. Today's classrooms not only provide more opportunities to communicate through writing, but students are also given more opportunities to share their learning via multimedia products. They are given opportunities to work and learn cooperatively . . . not always in isolation.

5. Leadership is transforming. Decision making is cooperative and employees must willingly produce at high levels, working together to meet common goals. Again, our students must be willing to work together in their classrooms and in their school to achieve common goals. We stress this in our school through the Responsive Classroom model, where the class becomes a community, all working for the common good.

6. Our society will change. There will be "the graying of America," and there will be greater gaps between the rich and the poor. Our students will see a true melting pot of cultures, where minorities will no longer be minorities. They must learn that differences in people around them must be valued and understood. They must be taught by parents and schools to embrace differences and learn about the many cultures in our country today. They will someday be faced with being the minority themselves. Are they ready?

When looking at these six trends, we can now understand why it is so important to teach more than the "basic skills." It becomes more evident that our children must be taught more than just the content of a given grade level. They must learn more than the three "R's." Enter today's classrooms and you will see students up and moving around, and they will be talking to one another. The classrooms where children sat quietly in their seats and worked in isolation are gone. You will see classrooms with tables or the desks pushed together in cooperative groups. Listen in and you will hear the students talking about their learning. They are communicating productively with their classmates. They are solving problems together, and they are working together to accomplish a task. You will see students engaged in several different activities during one class period, and you will see students sitting together reading and discussing and sharing their work. Some students might be working in groups while others work individually. Children are beginning to write at a much younger age. They are creating more projects, and they are engaged in more hands-on learning. They use the Internet to locate information and they learn how to share their knowledge in alternative ways, not just through worksheets, reports and tests. These are just a few examples of how we have changed in order to prepare our students for the future. Will they be prepared? We know that at East Kingston we are keeping our eye on the future and doing our best to provide learning experiences that will set the stage for success for all of our students.

The month of January seems to have flown by now that we are at this end of it. We have been very lucky with the weather, and I hope we continue to be so.

Our January math topic was addition, using Cuisenaire rods to explore the concept. Many of the children are getting quite proficient at making various number combinations for addition facts through ten. While we are not writing the addition facts at this time, we are reading our work in mathematical sentences; e.g., four plus four equals eight, one plus three plus four equals eight.

The theme for the month of January was winter weather and its effect on our animal friends. We took a trip to the Arctic, reading many books about snow and Arctic animals during our class meetings. Our reading groups read about forms of water and Arctic inhabitants.

We made bird feeders to help our feathered friends during the long winter months. Hung outside on the tree by our courtyard window, they are a big hit, but unfortunately the visitors have not been coming during school time, so I am not sure if we are feeding feathered or furry friends.

We had a great MLK observance in the classroom. We read a short book about his philosophy and decided it was much the same as our Kindergarten philosophy. We worked in groups based solely on the color of our eyes and sat at separate tables for most of the day. Our last project was a cooperation puzzle that could only be completed if you worked with a child from the other group. You could not choose a partner from the other group, you had to find the one person in that group who had the puzzle pieces you both needed to make a picture of MLK for each of you. It took some dancing and searching before everyone had a completed puzzle to take home. At the end the day, the children had decided that making choices based only on a physical characteristics didn’t make much sense to them. It wasn’t as much fun if you didn’t include everyone as you worked through the day. To celebrate the joy of sharing and diversity, the morning class enjoyed the visit with the musician Michael Wingfield on Wednesday, and the afternoon class enjoyed a visit from the Readers Theatre, who read Tacky the Penguin.

The kindergartners proudly took home their first report card for the year in January. Everyone is working very hard to be a quality student and a good friend to all.

Welcome 2002! Our class made a paper quilt with the Lakota star pattern after experimenting with blocks to make the design. The Lakota Indians believe that the star means a new beginning.

Two new happenings in Grade One are our unit on birds and our color teams. We are using the IIM research model and will culminate our unit with presentations of our “at home” research projects later in February. Through teaming and cooperative learning tasks we are improving at working together and solving group problems. Our teams will change monthly and each child will rotate the jobs while working on group projects. At present recorder seems to be the favorite task!

Boys and girls are now writing in their story journals, and we’re focusing on main idea, a good title, and sequencing our thoughts so our stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In math we’re learning about fractions (now that we are more than half way through the school year!), counting to 100 (day 100 will be arriving in February), and two-digit addition and subtraction. In February we will continue this focus.

Our Word Wall is growing with words that we can read, spell, and rhyme. Our on-going study of those five vowels helps us make the sounds they represent.

Martin Luther King Day was special. We role-played segregation and really had a feel for what black children and adults suffered. We also enjoyed the music of Michael Wingfield! Our diversity poster, displayed in the hall, celebrates our differences! We are trying to make Dr. King’s dream come true as we continually work on cooperation within our classroom.

It's hard to believe how much we have gotten done in one short month! Secretly, we have all been hoping for at least one snow day, and Friday our wish was granted.

We have finished a very special family project. We made collages with pictures sent in from home. Families participated in this project by answering questions that were eventually placed on the collage. The children worked hard to make a border that showed something important about their families. The borders themselves are a fabulous representation, but add the text and the pictures and they have become masterpieces! We are working on the idea that we are all connected. This idea, of course, means different things to different children. But we have learned through our Japan study that truly we have more in common with the families around us than we have differences!

The children have also completed their first Picturing Writing books, entitled Painting the Sky. The illustrations are breathtaking and the descriptive words that the children used are top-notch. This arts-based literacy program has been pivotal in the children's growth as writers -- many of them beg to stay in for recess so that they can write! WOW! We are looking forward to the next Picturing Writing unit where we will be writing about winter and exploring different art media for the illustrations.

We will begin learning about the winter Olympics. The children will be doing some Olympic math, including graphing the medal standings. We will learn about the different events and some of the athletes. We may even have our own classroom mini-Olympic games! There's a lot to look forward to here in first grade! We can't wait to share with all of you in the next “News and Notes.” Until then, happy winter!

Second grade spent January working on a quilt unit incorporating math - geometry pattern, color and fractions. We have read many quilt stories and learned a little about quilts throughout history. Many second graders shared special blankets and baby quilts, pillows and many quilt stories. Quilter Merrilyn SanSouci visited us on January 18. As a class we worked on many sewing projects - pouches, puppets and bookmarks; and we made many paper quilts to brighten our walls. We are finishing up a cloth quilt.

We have been learning about fractions and geometry with our quilts. Other math activities included people fractions, number tiles, pattern blocks, and reviewing basic subtraction. In February we will be getting into more paper and pencil borrowing work. In math we will be working on subtraction of multi-digit numbers.

During early February we will celebrate Groundhog Day with some light and shadow activities. Our unit for February is fairy tales. We will review the elements of plot: setting, character, problem, events and resolution. We will read many standard and and unusual versions of fairy tales, comparing and contrasting them. Toward the end of the month, on Thursday, February 21, we will be having a fairytale luncheon and each second grader will be invited to dress up as a fairytale character.

Wow! Where did the month of January go? It has been a great month of learning. In our study of literacy this month, we centered our book club reading around biographies. We looked into the lives of Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, and Helen Keller. In guided reading groups, we centered upon one biography, but it was easy to see that the students really enjoyed this type of non-fiction. As each group read its biography, the groups shared each person’s life they were learning about. As students completed one biography, they quickly moved on to other biographies because their interests became peaked. This lead to many biographies transferring into self-selected reading choices. Non-fiction reading has definitely been a hit this month! This was evident in the student’s presentations of their biography book box projects. They were wonderful and so interesting. Everyone did a great job presenting, asking questions and making meaningful comments. We all learned lots of great information about many famous people, from Julius Caesar to Mia Hamm.

In writing, we have worked on prompts, as well as individual story lines. We are trying to work on introductory sentences that hook our readers, good beginnings, middles and ends to our stories, continuing to incorporate detail and vivid vocabulary and, of course, sharpening our revising and editing skills to make our stories the best they can be. We have also worked on writing similes and people poems about ourselves. During February we will be working on some letter writing to kick off the beginning of our school wide Wee Deliver postal program. If you would like to write to your child, please drop your card or letter in the mail box in the front entry to the school. Mail will be delivered weekly on Fridays.

In math we are making good progress with our multiplication facts. Continued practice at home is very helpful. We also continue to work on place value, rounding numbers to the nearest tens, hundreds and thousands, and word problems with multiple steps. These can sometimes be tricky, but we are learning to read carefully looking for key words to help us with strategies for solving. We also have been studying graphing and looking at how to construct and read information on graphs. We held a Tic-Tac-Toe tournament, tallying wins, losses and ties. We then constructed a graph to display our class’s results and voted on an appropriate title for our graph. We are now working on a skittle color graph helping us to see what colors were most often found in our group packages of skittles. While doing these calculations, we are also finding average numbers, estimating and looking at fact families in multiplication and division. We have also introduced two new big vocabulary words in math. Ask your child to show you a palindrome or construct a tessellation for you!!!

In science, we are studying the planets and space. We will be looking at the stages of the moon, the order of the planets, space travel, exploration and researching each of the planets and what they are like. This is always an interesting and fun unit.

In social studies, we have just completed a IIM group research project on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Our culminating group project was a big book written and constructed by the entire class. This project incorporated many skills: book construction, researching using different sources, learning about plagiarism, writing, editing, sequencing and working cooperatively to reach a final product we can evaluate using a rubric. This taught us the steps to follow and now we are ready to begin individual research on a famous person. This month we will also keep abreast of the Olympics and learn about famous black Americans while celebrating Black History Month.

During our school wide celebration of Martin Luther King Day we were grateful to have a visit from Michael Wingfield, a wonderful African drummer. We watched The Story of Ruby Bridges, depicting the life of a young girl as she integrates a southern school system in the 1950’s. We performed many activities, including plays and interviews, to help us see how we are alike and unique with many special gifts to contribute to each other. This helped us to celebrate the life and dreams of Dr. King.

January has been a fun-filled month for the students in 3W! We've been reading biographies in class, as well as at home. The biography memory box assignments that have been brought to school are fantastic! They're on display in the hallway outside the classroom. Students will be presenting their memory boxes to their classmates and discussing the book they've read. We've had some terrific presentations already, and we're looking forward to hearing the rest.

Our students had a variety of wonderful learning experiences on MLK Day. We read about and discussed diversity, did writing and language arts activities, and watched Ruby Bridges, which was enjoyed by everyone. The class discussion following the movie was incredible.

This month we've also been researching the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. using a IIM format. Once we’ve finished gathering and organizing the facts, we will work on a culminating activity together. We’ve put together a timeline of the most important events in his life and taken notes during the movie, My Friend Martin, which will be used in the IIM. It's turning out to be a fun project.

Multiplication is still in the forefront for math. It won't be long before we can have our class ice cream sundae party - everyone is working very hard to make it through the multiplication facts. We've been working on graphing this month, learning about the different types of graphs, gathering data and putting it into a graph format, and writing about the information on the graph. We've had some pretty awesome stories about the graphs! We also continue to review place value, money, measurement, subtraction with regrouping, and much more.

Many thanks for all the time you spend helping your kids with their homework, reading, and projects. It's very much appreciated.

January was biography month in 4A. We listened to Leon’s Story, the story of a black janitor in a Baltimore elementary school. He experienced first-hand the injustices of segregation and participated in Civil Rights marches in the sixties. This led into our discussions about Martin Luther King and our dreams for accepting diversity in the world.

The children read biographies and compared qualities in themselves to those of the people they read about. We completed a IIM project about New Hampshire Notables, where each fourth grader researched one notable and shared what was learned with the class. This culminated with a Notables Tea, hosted by President and Mrs. Franklin Pierce, in costume. In attendance, also costumed, were Passaconaway, Amos Fortune, John Stark, John Paul Jones, Hannah Duston, Daniel Webster, Celia Thaxter, Sara J. Hale, Robert Frost, Alan Shepard, Christa McAuliffe, Lynn Jennings, and Judd Gregg.

In math we are working on problem solving, estimation, and multiplication by a two-digit number. Our social studies and science focus has been the earth. We have begun literacy circles with a theme that ties into science; each group is reading a novel about surviving a natural disaster: blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, and volcanoes. Children are responsible for guiding the discussion; each has a specific role. These are listed in Ms. Hayes’ article.

A special thank you to Ms. Hayes and the parents who helped us produce papers for Image-Making.

January was a busy month in our class, and the first half of the school year has flown by. We celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 21^{st and my class took the opportunity to reflect upon his contributions and his dream. We also collaborated on a class book of dreams for making the world a better place.}

We have been reading about the five themes of geography in social studies, and studying the physical earth in science.

In math the students continued to work on long division with remainders. They learned how to check their answers using multiplication. Fractions were introduced and the students are adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators. Next they’ll be working on equivalent fractions and mixed numbers.

Readers in 4H worked hard to meet their second quarter goals. At the end of January we arranged “Literacy Circles” facilitated by Mrs. Atkins, Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Silverman, and me. Jobs are given to each student within their circle such as: Discussion Director, Literary Luminary, The Connector, Illustrator and Word Finder. The jobs are rotated chapter by chapter so that every student has an opportunity to do each one. The theme of our reading books is surviving natural disasters.

We continue to practice C.O.P.S. with dictation and spelling, and it’s time again for the National Spelling Bee! A total of 20 finalists have been chosen from the fourth and fifth grades to compete in the local level competition on Wednesday, February 20.

Many thanks to the parents who volunteered to help with the first step of Image-Making! We set up art stations in both fourth grades and the art room and spent a productive afternoon creating beautiful papers. The papers will be the basis for the books they are beginning to write.

The fifth grade has begun a review and the expansion of our fraction knowledge. We have reviewed part-to-whole relationships, equivalent fractions, and lowest terms (reduced, simplest form) fractions. We are continuing to work on comparing fractions with different denominators by changing them into equivalent fractions with a common denominator. This is the basis for adding and subtracting fractions with different denominators. We are also working on the concepts of mixed numbers and improper fractions and converting one to the other. Understanding these processes depends on understanding the basic vocabulary involved and being facile with multiplication tables and addition and subtraction facts. When checking, helping with, or discussing homework, please ask that the kids use the correct vocabulary; for example, say “numerator” or “denominator” rather than “the top number” or “the bottom number.” Timed multiplication table tests will begin to reappear weekly.

In science we have made hygrometers, devices for measuring relative humidity (how much moisture is in the air) by measuring the evaporation rate of water. We use thermometers, a string and a cup of water. One thermometer measures air temperature; the other has a string attached to the bulb. The string is placed in water. As the water wicks along the string, it also evaporates at a rate dependent on the air’s temperature and its moisture content. The temperature of this thermometer changes very quickly. By comparing the two temperatures and using a prepared chart we can determine the relative humidity of an area.

We have been using some of our temperature data with Mr. Fennell in the computer lab to make computer generated graphs.

Our research of European explorers is almost complete. We’re ready to learn about the many explorers who set out to find a Northwest Passage. The fifth graders’ hard work will be compiled into a book of famous European explorers.

We will spend time during reading talking about early American colonies through the books Witch of Black Bird Pond and Johnny Tremain. Then we’ll discover the reasons that brought the colonists to battle the British in the Revolutionary War. Some lessons will be taught through short plays, poems, and, of course, research!

Our studies in January were centered around musical families of the orchestra and the job of the conductor. Focus for first grade is the percussion family and instruments in the classroom. We read our first form of notation through the Kindermusik lessons: “The Elephant’s Adventure” and “My Little Snowman.” Kindermusik is a method of teaching specifically for the younger children. Symbols and pictures are used to represent what, in the future, will be notation. Both rhythm and melody are explored. We also tried our hands at being the conductor.

A wonderful new video of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” narrated by Sting, introduced second graders to the specific tone colors in each family of instruments. We sang about quilts and read and sang “bear rhythms.”

Well under way is our study of a woodwind, the recorder. Third graders have found that reading printed music, knowing and performing fingerings, and playing the correct notes at the right time in the right beat test their coordination and concentration. We are beginning to sound like true musicians now as that “squeaky” period is gone.

In grade four we did a complete review of the families and played some fun games of identification. We discussed the difference between folk and orchestral instruments and how folk instruments were invented. Grade five took the percussion family more in depth and identified specific instruments by timbre. Mr. Benjamin Britten has written a piece for the orchestra which highlights each family individually.

Our patriotic song for January was “America the Beautiful.” Each class sang and discussed history and background for our February song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Its poetic language is a bit challenging to remember, but its history was very interesting. We discovered it was written at the time of the Civil War in our country and was very inspirational to the people of that time.

In January Grade 1 did Japanese inspired watercolor fans, cut paper (shape) birds and started making creative papers with the technique of straw blowing. Grade 2 used an assortment of watercolor techniques to make papers for Image Making. We also made quilt squares. This was a great lesson involving the skills of tracing and cutting in addition to design.

Grade 3 has been studying the universe. In conjunction with this unit we have made trees silhouetted against the evening sky to explore the concept of line. The children drew their interpretations of the universe using pastels while exploring the concepts of line, shape and texture.

The fourth grades have been studying art history. In art class we read excerpts by Celia Thaxter and did beautiful watercolor paintings exploring various watercolor techniques. Landforms were also interpreted with watercolor. Both lessons focused on color, value and texture.

Grade 5’s art lessons were coordinated with social studies. We’ve made rolled paper Egyptian necklaces with emphasis on shape and color. Recycled “trash” has been used to make one of a kind boats used by the early explorers. Great job on collecting and being innovative!

All classes started weaving using paper to learn the basic over and under technique. The children are excited about this unit. Please send in yarn, cloth ribbon, lace and wrapping ribbon (basically, anything that can be used to weave) in a bag labeled with your child’s name. Thank you!

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