Hi Parents!
A few years ago Millburn adopted the American Reading Company (ARC) curriculum. One of the core beliefs of ARC is that students should be reading one hour each day. This prompted our school to emphasize the importance of reading independently for 30 minutes each day in school. The other 30 minutes is what we hope students do at home each night. I’ll admit it… for about five consecutive years I really didn’t like the 30 minutes of independent reading each day. This is not because I didn’t believe in it. I do believe that it is vital. I believe that it is so beneficial. I love that we do it at Millburn. But, what I discovered those first years was that this thirty minutes of reading looked a bit more like Mr. Thomas circulating around the classroom and managing students. I wanted to talk about reading with students but instead the time was riddled with interactions like:
- “Open your book please.”
- “What happened to the book you started yesterday?”
- “Well, reading is the only option right now…”
- “No, it’s not time to be on YouTube.”
Picnic communication was sent out last week. I have received a number of messages from parents wondering what the timeframe is for the event. We will be leaving the elementary school by 9AM. We will begin packing up and boarding buses to return to MES around 1:45ish. Parents are welcome to stop by for as long as they wish. We will need parents to help organize games, set up items, hand out snacks/food, take pictures, and celebrate. It truly is one of the best days of the year. I hope to see you there! If you have any questions… Please feel free to let me know!
MAP testing is next week on Tuesday at 8:15 (reading). We will test again the following Tuesday at 8:15 as well. If you get a chance, remind your child to take their time, give their best, and tell them that they have worked so hard this year… they are ready to show it!
Our ELA block this week was split into three main pieces. Of course we had our daily silent reading time. But the other two chunks of time were spent on civil rights and informational text. We are now one full week into our civil rights projects and they are going great. Each student has selected a civil rights activist to research and create a presentation on. The main components of the presentation will be an introduction, timeline, and five Q&A style questions for their activists. In order to truly show how well we know about these famous people… students will ask them five questions and compose what they think their person would say. Here is an example a student has created for Malcolm X:
Q: Why did you leave the Nation of Islam?
A: Although I valued my time within the Nation of Islam, I recognized that I no longer had the same views as the group. My opinions were being criticized by fellow NOI members and they ultimately chose to silence me. How can a group that I have dedicated my entire life to punish me for standing up for what we believe in?! I was furious. I decided to split from the NOI because they no longer supported me and had my back as an activist. I wanted to be myself and they were suppressing that.
As you can see the students truly must know about their activist to answer these types of questions. I think this is a higher level of thinking than just relaying information on their person. Ask your child what questions they are considering asking their activist and how they would respond!
Informational text has surfaced over the school year as a relative weakness for this group. When I say weakness… I don’t mean we are bad at it or struggling. I mean that compared to reading literature we are not as strong. I sat back and reflected on all of the short stories we have read this year, the narrative writing, the fun rubric dialogue writing, and all the elements that do not fall within the informational category. I decided to dedicate this week to circling back to informational text standards. Yes, we read informational texts every day. But I wanted to be very specific on the skills we were practicing this week. We started by looking at text structures. Informational texts can be organized by cause/effect, problem/solution, description, sequence, or compare and contrast. Students worked to identify these. Other skills that we practiced were main idea, noticing author's bias, and summarizing with details. Students did very well with these skills. I tried to include a way array of topics during the week as well. In many cases, students score well if the informational text interests them and not as well if they do not have background knowledge of the topic. When we are novices of the topic we are reading on, it is all the more important to rely on the reading skills we have learned in order to fully comprehend the text.
Our “how to” speeches are almost complete in science class. I have a feeling it is going to be quite the scene on Monday and Tuesday. Each student has a specific day they are required to present to their peers on a topic of their choice. I can see it now… An unknowing teacher is walking down the hallway, passes our room, happens to glance in and immediately a confused look comes across their face. They pause and look again. They see bowling motions, huge paper drawings, slime, volleyballs, pet rocks, invisible ink, chess, origami, smiling, excitement, and a teacher soaking it all in. Will it be the most academic time of our year? Certainly not. But I do think the ability to present to peers is an invaluable skill. You bet. Ask your child what they are presenting! Let me know if you have any questions.
SMORE this week I really wanted to make sure I got some uninterrupted time to work on reading skills with students. This led to us doing station work. Each day we would watch a ten minute kids news segment to start. Then, students would have four tasks to complete during the SMORE block. One of the activities was to summarize a story from the news segment, one was to meet with me for reading, and the other two stations rotated between figurative language to a reading game. We had good conversations, worked on some important skills, and had fun doing it.
Math was all about review this week. I am planning on next week being our final week of Khan Academy for the year. Students have worked tirelessly each week to finish their Khan Academy homework and I am proud to announce that we have covered all of the fifth grade math standards. We will still talk a bit more about customary conversions and different ways to plot data. But we have mastered fifth grade math (and more). Please note, that does not mean that we will be spending math time from here on out with filler activities. Nope. I’d say it is the exact opposite. We will now take all that we know and apply it. This week we applied it through a series of group activities. Students were put in groups and given daily tasks. They were required to help each other, solve problems, divide/conquer, and remain positive when the problems got difficult. I always try to combine skills that we practiced all year. We know the order of operations. We also know decimal operations. Hmm… Seems to me that we should combine the two skills. Here was a task that groups worked on this week:
(5 x 1.4 - 4.7)2 + 12 x 0.3
So, yeah. We are applying what we know. We are pushing boundaries. We are not letting up.
Have a wonderful weekend.