Schedule, Legion of Honor, Westminster Woods, and Your LettersI

I hope the weekly class schedule that I attached to the email is helpful to you. 

I'm excited to introduce Shreya LaRoche as room parent for the Team this year. She'll be helping me with important logistics throughout the year, such as coordinating drivers for trips and food for events. Keep an eye out for her emails. I'm so grateful, Shreya!

Thank you to Valerie, Genevieve, and Shreya for volunteering to drive on next Wednesday's field tip to the Legion of Honor in the city! We'll be leaving from CCS around 9:30. 

Exactly one week after our trip to the museum, we'll take off as a class for Westminster Woods in Occidental! It's a very sweet way to start the year together. We always come back feeling more confident and independent as individuals and more connected than ever as a team. Our class is lucky enough to be working with a veteran Westminster Woods naturalist who is very experienced with third and fourth graders. We'll be studying stream and redwood ecology and getting out one day for an all-day hike! We'll enjoy nutritious meals as a school in the dining hall and evenings will be spent at an all-school campfire and a 3rd/4th grade night hike adventure. Bedtime (in beds, lights out) is 9:00. I'll be staying in the cabins with the students and it always feels like such a lovely honor to wrap the kids up with love while they're away from home. Check out the trip packet that went home on Monday and please let me know if you have any questions about the trip.

Look out for Shreya's email regarding drivers!

The students were very excited to receive your letters today. Thanks again for coming last night. I look forward to reading your completed questionnaires about your awesome kid.

I enjoyed our morning together today!
Claire and Emmy are working together on their student survey.

Welcome!

Hi families!

Welcome to another exciting year on Team 3/4! I couldn’t be more excited to get this year started with my new crew of learners. I’m back from a dually refreshing and adventurous summer, feeling full of energy and inspiration to share with the students. This blog is one of the ways that I will keep you informed as to the goings on in our class. I’ll post updates, important information, pictures, stories, and student work for you to enjoy. Please let me know if there is anything that you’re wondering about that you’d like me to focus on in my posts. This blog is for you!

Our first day together was fantastic. It felt great to see returning faces and ask them to step up as fourth grade leaders on the team. I also loved welcoming new students to my class and our school, introducing them to our classroom culture and expectations.

Today we focused on connecting with one another and beginning the important work of building our team.  We talked about the words “why” and “because” and how important these words become in the third and fourth grades. We explored some essential questions about how we want our classroom to feel and function. For example, “Why is school important to you?” and “What do the students need to do in order to have a successful year?" and "How should our classroom feel every day?" We also began to get organized and get to know the flow of daily life here. 

We also explored the concept of inference. Students looked at images, identified what they noticed, what they already know about the things they noticed, and identified what they could infer based on the evidence and their schema. Later in the day we did the same with the cover of our first text of the year, E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It is one of my all-time favorite books! It's about a brother and sister who run away from home and move into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have a fun museum-themed project planned to get the year started with a bang, and part of that is a series of field trips to local museums. Art Teacher Julie and I will be taking the kids to the Legion of Honor in the city on September 3. Drivers? Let me know if you’re available! We’ll leave first thing at 8:30.

3^rd and 4^th graders will have PE on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:15- 12:00. Make sure that students have appropriate footwear for their first PE class on Thursday!