Dear Parents,
As part of our Peace unit, we choose words from a basket each morning to carry with us all day. Each word is asociated with peace in some way – joy, goodness, sharing, gratitude, friendship, sincerity, kindness, hope, wisdom , beauty, freedom and trust.
During our reflections at day’s end, we share a time during the day when they either experienced their peaceful word, receiving it or sharing with someone else. This class has shown wonderful insights with their moments and the hands are flying at the end of the day. These conversations are also helping as they work on their Peace poems.
On Tuesday, I played President Obama’s speech (a shortened version) at Nelson Mandela’s Memorial for the class. It was wonderful for them to hear him speak of Ghandi and Dr. King as peacemakers and include Mandela in that category. It is always gratifying to see them making connections with what we study in class with real world events.
In Math class we are quickly moving on from our concrete work with chip trading to addition with regrouping with great success.
We had a terrific lunch bunch on Wednesday thanks to Emily Bernard and Lauren Slater. It was appreciated by all!
As you may have heard, there was no homework assigned this week and none will be next week either. I wanted them to have a chance to concentrate on their book reports and then the Peacemaker report next week.
During these cold winter days, I ask that everyone have hats and gloves. Everyone was good to go this afternoon…thank you! Dry socks are always welcome too.
There is a short slide show below with some shots of our book reporters. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get everyone, but they were all good presentations reflecting a solid understanding of the connection between their paper bags items and the events and actions of their stories. We really enjoyed some of the home-made additions! All of the items are going back home today (if they haven’t gone home already) and I’m holding onto the written work until next week.
Books from the Book Sale will be going home with the students next week.
Hope to see some of you tomorrow at the Holiday Concert at 1:30.
Stay Warm!
Katharine
