Weekly Update

Dear Families,

We have some very exciting news to share with you all this week. As you might recall, last week the students wrote a collaborative letter to an author called Sheri Amsel, whose books we have explored in class in connection with our unit on ecology and habitats around the world. The students asked for a skype session with her and she has accepted!!
If everything goes as planned, we will skype with her next Wednesday morning at 8:30 am (2/3/10). We would like to invite family members to join our classroom for this wonderful celebration of literature and ecology!! If you can, please come promptly as we will start chatting at 8:30 sharp and return the attached slip (For those families reading this letter on the blog, please be advised your child will bring home a separate sheet for you to sign. Thank you). The skyping will last for approximately 30 minutes and the students will have already prepared questions to ask her. Sheri Amsel is both a writer and an illustrator and she uses many different forms of art in her books. I have linked many sites on her work, biography and books on our classroom digital portfolio, which is linked on the blog sidebar. The url for this site is www.summitprojects.pbworks.com

I have linked Sheri Amsel’s sites on summitprojects.pbworks.com under “Red Clover”, Abraham Lincoln, because just like young Grace Bedell, we wrote letters to a well-known person too!

In response to this great opportunity for our students, vocabulary homework this week will be a little different. Every child brought home a regular list of 5 words. Your child can follow our regular guidelines and write definitions and sentences for those words. If your child wants, he or she can choose their own 5 new words from any of the linked Sheri Amsel sites related to ecology (and not already studied). The guidelines are still the same, but your child chooses his/her own words. Since we will work in small groups and partnerships to explore possible questions for Sheri Amsel in the next few days, your child might have a specific area of interest for her. Good luck and have fun creating questions, sentences and ideas about ecology and nature!

Report cards are coming home this week. Please sign the envelope and send it back to school empty so I know you received the information. I have met with all the students who were interested in chatting about their report cards so there should be no surprises. If you have any questions or wish to meet with me, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Our next unit in Writer’s Workshop will be “Response to Literature.” The students will learn effective strategies to analyze characters in books. We will primarily focus upon character attributes and change as we learn to use a rich and interesting vocabulary to back up our statements with evidence from the texts.

We will not start another science unit for another couple of weeks as we are wrapping up our unit on States of Matter. The students are also exploring scientific inquiry skills, observational techniques and data gathering as we prepare for the district-wide science assessment in about two weeks.

Have a great weekend. We hope to see you next Wednesday at 8:30 am!
Regards,

Maria McCormack