It has been a busy week. Here are some of the things we worked on.

Language Arts
Book groups started this week! Leslie, Lora, Betsy, Maureen and Charlene are facilitating the five book groups. (Thanks, Ladies!) Shilo, Dog Friday, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, Dear Mr. Henshaw, and Yang the Youngest and his Terrible Ear are the five realistic fiction novels we are reading. By choosing the same genre, realistic fiction, I am hoping that the learners will have talks outside of their book groups regarding the rich characters in their stories. This round included the parent facilitators modeling active reading while introducing the story. (Often called "the hook"). Reading the first chapter helps get the right pronunciation of names and places, and help establishes the tone of the story. The learners created illustrations and wrote letters to me to show their understanding of what they've read so far. The learners signed an important Reader's Contract. The expectation is if they cannot finish the story, they need to work on reading at home. (There should be plenty of time to read during the week.)

Jamie ran small groups during Reader and Writer's Workshop time this week. The learners worked on their Explorer multiple intelligence projects, proofreading for capitalization and understanding plot in reading during this time. While the class was working in smaller groups, I was able to do many independent reading assessments. (Thanks, Karen for making copies.) I also gave a non-fiction writing pre-assessment. We will be part of the whole district writing assessments in March/April, and this is a good benchmark piece to have to show growth.
Art
The children had a very cool art project with Sabrina in Art this week. The chidren completed very life-like portraits (minus the blue and yellow faces) in art this week. These stained glass style portraits are clinging to our windows. Come check them out when you have time.

Math Agreement
We spent the morning talking about the math homework this week. As a class we shared our thoughts about these problems. Many learners expressed that the problems were too hard, many expressed that they were successful solving most of them. We then talked about how to get support with these problems. It was interesting to hear their insights. Many learners were afraid that if they had their parent help them, they would show them how to solve the problem in a way that they didn't understand, but provided them with an answer. They were afraid that this wasn't what I wanted. They really weren't sure if asking for help was ok. I told them that I expected that they would need help, and it is ok to ask for support. One of the learners asked a great question. He wondered what he should do when his mom showed him a strategy that didn't make sense to him, even when she explained it. We talked about how we all solve problems differently and that it was alright to learn new ways, and that they could also teach you their way of solving.

So, to help with these concerns, as a class we created a math help agreement to share with you to support you and your learner with math problems.

Goal: Math is not just about the answers. It is about how we show our thinking and explain how we solve the problems.

When and how do we get help?
*Read the problems with a parent or adult
*With your parent underline the important facts given and figure out what the question is asking (don't solve here, just talk about the problem so that it makes more sense)
*Write down the important information and the question using words and numbers
*Choose a strategy to try (draw a picture, make a list, etc)
*Try strategy on own (this means the learners should try it on their own, but you can also solve the problem and then come together to share the problem, what you each did, and the results. Did you have different answers, why? Where did you do something different?)
*Share thinking with parent
*You can check with a calculator here if you would like, but often the learners strategies will be different than what you might choose, so don't impose your strategy on them. One way is to work on the problem separately from them and then share the steps you took.
*If they are stuck at any time, they should email me questions so I can respond with strategies to help get them started. I told them I check my email several times a day, so they would get a response quickly.
*If you have tried the problems, but are feeling frustrated, put it away and create two whiteboard problems and solve them.

I want to walk you through the first problem we did today. Many learners raised their hands when I asked who thought this problem was too hard.
First, I had a copy of the problem on the board and we read it together. We cleared up any of the words they didn't understand. We talked about how digital camera's have a memory card that stores information and that there are lots of different sizes of memory cards.
Second, together we underlined the important information in the problem. We underlined 32 mb and each picture holds 2.6mb. We then underlined the question "how many pictures can the card hold?"

I told the learners that if I was going to solve this, I would need to draw a picture. I drew a square on the board and said, "I took one picture of Teo,how many mb is this picture?' We looked back at our underlined information and figured out the pic. was 2.6mb. Then I drew a second square. How many mb was my pic of Kelsey? 2.6. I wrote that on the square. I stopped then and asked how much space I had used for two pictures? We talked about how we learned that decimals are like money, so it would be easy to add 2.6+2.6. We got the sum for two pics. This would be a good way to get your learner going at home, then have them work on it on their own. Many of them were amazed at how easy the problem actually could be. Lots of them thought they needed to do 32 divided by 2.6 and had no strategies to solve this. Everyone could solve it the way we did it in class today, actually many of the learners that raised their hands in the beginning saying it was too hard were the ones solving it.

I wanted to provide you with a glimpse of how I supported the learners to solve this. I think sometimes it is hard to find ways to support your learner in math because they might solve problems differently than you or I were taught. I would suggest moving away from jumping in with a problem like 32 divided by 2.6, and instead breaking it down even further. I appreciate the discussion this homework assignment created, and want to provide you with as much parent education in math as I can. Please hold your learners accountable to our math help agreement. I hope now they are on the same page as me.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions or need support.

Have a terrific weekend,
Elysha and Lale