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. I'm very excited about our new campus, new faculty, and new resources! 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 week 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.
This week we focused on connecting with one another and beginning the important work of building our team. We began to get organized and get to know the flow of daily life here. We began our Readers' Workshop- one of the central elements of life in our class. Students studied different examples of fiction and non-fiction books and the genres that further define texts. I love to begin the year with this work because it gives me a sense of the books that my individual students are most drawn to. My students will tell you that one of my favorite parts of my job is helping kids find books that are the right fit for them. This year I'll be able to work with the Fairfax Library to make this happen! One of the many reasons to be grateful for Michelle is that she's organized a weekly library program for each class. Team 3-4 kiddos will walk to the library every week on Tuesday to find high-interest, on-level books, as well as texts that target specific learning and content goals.
In the coming week we will focus on the words “why” and “because” and how important these words become in the third and fourth grades. We will explore 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?"
Overall, what I want you to hear from this post is that my most important goals for this year are to help my students build a happy, healthy community among themselves and to make sure that they feel both supported and pushed in their thinking. I want the students to question, wonder, struggle, succeed, and thrive. I teach third and fourth grade because I love this developmental moment- I'm honored to offer them information and framework for questioning and thinking that helps them develop their own big ideas about the world.
Let's always connect when you have questions or ideas. Email or a quick check-in in person after school is the best way to reach me. I look forward to Back to School Night when we'll look at the big-picture, through-line for the year.
Here's to a rockin' 2015-2016 school year!
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| First Day of School- taking surveys.... |
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| ...and graphing results. |
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| Sweet Friends! |
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| Class Library Exploration |
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| Clapping out quarter, half, and whole notes with Mike in our first music class |
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| In this teamwork challenge the students are working together to "Save Sammy". |
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| Sorting books into genre categories |
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| This pair is working on their genre diorama. They're creating a setting for a fantasy story. |
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| Every day for the first week the students gathered in multi-age groups to work on a project. They were challenged to create a chandelier to hang in the hallway and help beautify our new home. Each creation was covered with words that represent what home means to them. |
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| Make sure to check out their gorgeous work! |
