Hi All:
We are (finally) settled into the school year and have started working on the more substantial aspects of our first round of projects. Below are some updates. Important Dates to Remember (or Pencil In)
Student Council I am very proud of the 12 members of our class who ran for officer positions on Southmoor's student council. All of them ran good, honest campaigns and represented their class and school well. Congratulations to Owen Robbins (Vice President) and Joe Poole (Treasurer) who both won their elections. Our classroom representative for this year will be Elias Dean. Congrats, Elias! AmeriTowne Our AmeriTowne interview day is coming up, and Suzy, Alice, Stacy, and becca are currently signed up to help us conduct interviews. Interviews will run from 12:30 to 3:00, or whenever we get done. Students have (for the most part) completed their resumés and cover letters, and they all look very good. I'll have them take those home next week so you can see them! At this point, we are most of the way through the personal banking component of the AmeriTowne curriculum and will be moving into governance, money management, ethics, philanthropy, and job preparation beginning next week. English Language Arts & Social Studies For their U.S.-American history projects, most students at this point have compiled around 20 sources. In addition, most have written their abstracts for their projects and organized their information into five subcategories. As we move into next week, students will be working on writing properly cited essays for each of their subtopics. They have a lot of work left to do, but I am confident they will do it well! This project has been an intentionally slow process so far, as we've painstakingly covered the various details that students will need to have in place for their final products. They've all learned a lot about research and citation, and we've also spent a lot of time reviewing some concepts from last year (namely theses) and looking over examples. My feeling is that they are all now well situated for the next step of the project, which will focus on the work of writing. At the end, in roughly three-four weeks, students will have lengthy and detailed reports on their subjects, and they will then begin presenting their learning, as teachers, to the class. All students are still where they should be with respect to their projects. Students may work on their projects at home if they choose to, but doing so is not necessary. Math Students took their first unit test this week, and -- as the first test usually does -- it provided us all opportunities for learning about the rewards of effort and the consequences of the lack thereof. I.e., some students did very well and can use their first test as an affirmation of the work they've been putting in, while others did not do very well and will use their first test as an opportunity to recalibrate. For the first test, I allowed students to decide whether or not they wanted to take their tests home to show their families. From here on out, I'll send other unit tests home in Thursday folders. Starting today, we are moving into our second unit, which is on three dimensional geometry. Throughout the year, we'll continue to fold in concepts from our first unit which pertain to advanced multiplication and division. There are still some holes related to those concepts that we need to address. In Mrs. Larson's section, "Students have completed the Ratios and Proportional Relationships unit, including understandings of unit rates, equivalent ratios, and solving problems with unit rates and percentages. The next unit will be a unit on the Number System. In this unit, students will focus on concepts including division with fractions, decimals, common factors and multiples, positive and negative numbers, absolute value, ordering numbers, and the coordinate plane." Science There are often questions about science curricula at the beginning of any year. This year, like many in the past, I am not going to start with any science units until we finish our AmeriTowne unit. Immediately after we go to AmeriTowne, we will begin with our first science unit. Though Mr. Coursey has already started with science this year, I find that there simply is not enough time in each day for our class to add that to the schedule until we are done with AmeriTowne. This may mean that students will not receive a science grade on their report cards for the first trimester, and that's okay. Parent Meetings Again, if you want to meet with me about anything, please reach out! My schedule's open, and I would like to meet with as many individuals as possible. Thank you to those of you who've already met with me or scheduled meetings. All the very best, Parker
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Hi All:
If you look closely in the first photo above, you'll see the glorious pages of some 1,500 books we heisted as a class from the old trailer, in the dark (because we struggled to find all the lights), and yes we did set off the burglary alarm that none of us knew about. Sorry for missing Week 3. I had a post ready to go, and then lost it because I didn't save it, but felt that Curriculum Night perhaps made up for that post's absence. Thank you to all of you who were able to make it to Curriculum Night. At the very least, I hope it provided some context for the big pieces on which I'll be updating you throughout the year. This week's updates: Important Dates to Remember (or Pencil In)
AmeriTowne If you are available to help us conduct interviews on Monday, October 1, between 12:30 and 3:00, please let me know. And, if you would like to accompany our field trip on October 25, please let me know that, too! I started this week with the Econ 101 section of the AmeriTowne curriculum, and I am giving the class extra time to work through the curriculum leading up to our field trip, mainly because the kids in our class *love* to ask questions. Seriously, we spent a whole hour on the definition of economics, and that was not my fault. This week and next, we're learning about economics, free enterprise systems, and the flows of limited resources. In the following weeks we are going to get into civics, and then the combination of both, and the kids are going to start working on constructing resumes, job applications, and interview-type question responses. (It's a lot of fun.) English Language Arts & Social Studies In ELA & SS, we are continuing on with students' projects on topics of U.S.-American history. After learning how to create Chicago MS citations for sources, use footnotes, and write sentences with footnote citations to fact sources, we are now moving deeper towards the heart of students' projects. This week, students worked on writing abstracts for their projects which will serve as overviews of the work to come, and they are quickly becoming of army of citation machines (which I could have used last year, just saying). I am very impressed with the effort and enthusiasm that they are putting into their projects. From here, they are going to begin constructing theses (plural) for subtopics of their projects, and from there they are going to create research papers that cover multiple facets of their various topics. As far as other reading goes, I have been tracking students' additions to their book lists, and they all seem to be on track with respect to early tracking expectations. Planners & Homework Some kids are doing a great job of using their planners, and others are not. When it comes right down to it, I have never used a planner in my life, and so I understand those who share my aversion. However, as I have mentioned via multiple modalities, these past couple weeks have been about understanding what it is that kids do after school. On the whole, I feel I've strengthened my sense of that. I am going to introduce some baseline expectations next week, and I'll update you on those in next week's post, or you can ask your kid(s) about them Monday afternoon. As always, if you'd like to talk to me about homework or anything else, please let me know! Snacks Snacks are going well so far. Thank you to those of you who've participated and to those of you who're signed up. Also, thank you to Stacy and Erika for reminding us, via email, of some allergies that exist in our classroom. Please check Stacy's room parent emails if you haven't caught them, and remind us all if your kid has an allergy of which we should be aware! Parent Meetings I would really love for all of us to strengthen our relationships and objectives by getting together more frequently to talk about kids and life. I have had the pleasure of holding meetings with the parents of four students so far this year, and my goal is to meet with all parents at least once before we get to parent-teacher conferences. Please volunteer yourself (and your spouse) to meet with me! If you don't . . . I am going to track you down. There're always a hundred other things I could say, but I think that's enough, for now. Thank you all, for all you do. Parker |
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