5M Highlights:

·       I enjoyed meeting many of you at Back to School Night last night! I have attached the handouts that I gave out last night to this Friday Report if you were unable to attend.  If you were unable to attend and would like to set up a time to come tour the classroom and meet briefly with me, please contact me.

·       We have had another week of practicing our routines and procedures. The kids are really getting into the swing of things now! We have had several truly productive and successful Language Arts and Math Workshop times.

·       On Wednesday, we attended our first whole school Community Meeting. Some children were awarded perfect attendance awards for last school year, fifth graders welcomed kindergarteners to Skillin School with a shiny new green Skillin pencil, and the community took a moment to pause and admire the Pinwheels for Peace Project.

·       Students continued work in their small groups on the Class Convention Projects. The constitution team is finalizing a document to share with the group, the mascot team has sculpted the most amazing Pandicorn, the poster team has been working on the perfect habitat for the Pandicorn, the handshake/chant team has created the most amazingly intricate set of steps, and the flag group is doing their own creative interpretation of the Pandicorn.

·       Last week during Writer’s Workshop we spent time brainstorming and drafting ideas of how to retell Fairy Tales in brand new ways. This week after reading My Rotten Red-Headed Older Brother by Patricia Polacco for inspiration, we drew on stories from our own lives for ideas.

·       In Math Workshop, we continued work on Place Value by examining the patterns that exist when you move to the right and left in a number. We used M&Ms to attempt to picture how much ten times more or less actually looks like. We also looked online at the Mega Penny Project, a cool project some folks made to help others visualize large numbers. 

·       At morning meeting this week we played lots of games to help practice the skill of noticing. We watched a cool movie clip showing a theater group doing the most amazing giant shadow puppets, played Coseeki and What’s Changed, and practiced noticing interesting words and phrases in the morning message.

• Maybe last year you remember hearing about the Skillin Skyhawk Challenge or the Paint a Poem Challenge brought to us by the Skillin Challenge Committee. This group seeks to present us with interesting whole school challenges that work at improving student problem solving, perseverance, and community building. This year’s first challenge has just been unveiled. The question is…can we give Skillin School a hug? In other words, if every student and staff member at Skillin School holds hands, can we wrap all the way around the school? Our class has begun thinking about whether or not this might be possible. We are to vote sometime next week and then at the next fire drill, we will try it out! What a fun way to get kids thinking about measurement, perimeter, and estimation. What do you think? Can we give Skillin School a hug?