Spirit Week Updates

I have just finished uploading photos taken from Monday's hat day and "super shorts race!" I have added photos to both our classroom and Mrs. Klinger's classroom. Unfortunately, my camera battery was not charged for today but I should have it ready for tomorrow's Big Wheel race!

We had 100% classroom participation on Tuesday—everyone dressed in their pajamas! If we have the highest classroom participation all week we will be able to take part in a very special event with Mr. K on Friday! J

Please email me if you need the login and/or password for our classroom photobucket account. Check back later this week for more Spirit Week updates!

Classroom Updates

Wow! Time has just been flying by her at school and in the Perrien household! I apologize for not posting news sooner but there are days when I can hardly catch my breath! Here is what's going on in the upper elementary Montessori classroom at Waukazoo.

Tomorrow begins Spirit Week at Waukazoo. This week of fun and activities is eagerly anticipated each year at school! The list of activities includes:

Monday: Hat Day, the lunchtime activity will be a "Super Shorts Race." Students participating in the race include Sierra, Anna, Cara, Elaine, Max, David, Evan, and Jamesohn.

Tuesday: Pajama Day, the lunchtime activity will be a Tug O' War! Students tugging in the jammies include Emily, Emeline, Juliette, Sierra, and Genevieve. Also tugging are David, Aaron, Max, Tyler, and Jamesohn.

Wednesday: Team Spirit Day. Dress in support of your favorite team—could be college, high school, professional…whatever is your favorite! Our lunchtime activity will be a Big Wheel Race. Students racing for our class include Kevin, Logan, Elaine, and Evan!

Thursday: Crazy Day! How wild and crazy can we for the day? The lunchtime activity will be the Pudding Plunge! Students digging into bowls of pudding include Aaron, Genevieve, Anna and Cara. (See below about Physical Wellness class.)

Friday: Black and White Day! Dress in support of West Ottawa! There will be an assembly on the Waukazoo hill as we wind down Spirit Week and prepare for the evening's Fun Run.

**Volunteers are always needed outside during Spirit Week to help Mr. de manage the activities. Please stop in between 11:45 – 1 p.m. and help if possible. Thanks!

The Fun Run is Friday Night! Activities will begin at 6 p.m., although the Tailgate in the parking lot will begin around 5 p.m. Let's have 100% Fun Run participation from our class! Thanks for everything your family did to make our fundraiser successful!

Our students will be participating in the Mile Run in Physical Wellness class on Thursday. Let's make sure that we don't dress so crazy that we aren't able to run to the best of our ability!

Weekly workplans will continue to normalize this week and next week. We will be adding language (this week) and spelling (next week) to the workplan. Please make sure to look over the weekly reflection when it comes home on Monday night and let me know if you have questions about the workplan or something you've seen on the reflection.

Our soap carvings are almost finished. We will (tentatively) be displaying these in the display case near the school office! These carvings go along with the book we've been reading for teacher-read. We are currently reading The Door in the Wall, a Newbery award-winning novel by Marguerite de Angeli. We are also learning about castle and knight vocabulary as we read this book!

Please look for parent-teacher conference appointment slips to come home this week. Make sure that you do return the confirmation slip to let me know that your time is okay.    

Please check back this week for more classroom updates about student council and about MEAP testing dates. Also be sure to check out our classroom photo site for pictures of Spirit Week and the lunchtime activities. I will try to upload photos daily!

What is Notebooking?

We begin our school day with notebooking. Based on current writing research, notebooking is a period of time every day when children "just write." Topics are sometimes offered but not required. The children have plenty of personal topic lists ready to use. Two key components of notebooking:

** Children must write without pausing for the 5-10 minutes of notebooking. So far, this requirement has been met with excellent results! During this time, there is no talking.

**Children write daily.

Behind this activity is the idea that children will write better the more that they write. Notebooking is just one component of our writing program this year and one the students are already embracing!

Math Timed Tests

Why do we do the math speedway AND the five-minute timed test? Some have asked this question.

I will occasionally run into middle and high school math teachers; whenever I do I ask what they would like incoming students to know. One of the biggest, consistent complaints I hear is that students don't come them with automaticity of their basic math facts.

Our math speedway is a three or four day per week one-minute test with 10 problems. It covers basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Ideally, students move forward each time they take their speedway test.

The five minute timed test requires students to move through 100 basic math facts with 100% accuracy. Students do addition and subtraction in the beginning of the year each year as a baseline assessment. For the rest of the year, they only compete against their own score from the previous week. Steady progress in memorizing the facts is expected. As students move throughout the school year they have the opportunity to progress into more challenging five minute assessments.

These assessments can be fun and the students look forward to them (That is also why everyone starts at zero for the addition speedway.) Most importantly, they take very little time each week out of the school day but the results are seen in our daily math lessons as well as simple fact recall.

I am excited to announce the names of our new gym leaders. The following students will be volunteering their time each week to help Mr. de with one of his primary gym classes.

Gym leaders are Sierra, Evan, Genevieve, and Cara.

Students in grades 4 and 5 were asked to write a letter to myself and Mr. de explaining why they would make a good gym leader. Students will be able to apply again in January for the second semester.

Patriot Day pictures update

Never mind about the album mistake...I redid the album so that you will find it once you open "Perrien." The album reads, "Patriot Day 2008."

Sorry about the confusion.

Patriot Day pictures

All the Patriot Day pictures are loaded but I made a mistake and placed the Patriot Day album within the "First Day 2008" album. I'll see if I can move the albums around to make it easier to access the photos.

Have a great night!

Classroom Updates

Hope Student

I am excited to tell you that we will have a Hope College education student working in our classroom this fall. Mr. Rodriguez stopped in today to meet the students and observe our class at work. In addition to his work as a teacher-in-training at Hope, Mr. Rodriguez works in an after-school program at Pine Creek Elementary.

T-shirts

Students designed T-shirts that tell about themselves. These T-shirts are hanging in the hallway above our lockers.

PTA Fundraiser

Students have received their PTA fundraiser materials and collection envelopes. Please mark your calendars to be at the Fun Run/Walk on October 3 at 6 p.m. We had a wonderful event last year...I hope we are able to do it again!

Finally...

Patriot Day Pictures

I took several shots of the students placing their flags for Patriot's Day. I will post the photos to our Photobucket account either later tonight or tomorrow afternoon.

Student Writing!

I would like to share two wonderful writing samples from recent classroom work! Students were asked to take a situation and paint a snapshot in time of what was happening, to be very descriptive and tell the story in a complete and interesting way. In the story, the main character has gum stuck in his (or her) hair and his bangs are sticking straight up!

The first is from Genevieve:

"Aw-w man!" thought Jeremy as he walked into his room. "I'm never going to be able to get this out." Jeremy got out his little hand mirror and sighed. "I never should have gotten into that contest with Nick, to see who could blow the bigger bubble," he thought.
He thought hopelessly about what to do with his hair. Then all of a sudden it clicked, wash it. He walked into the bathroom, put his head over the sink and turned on the warm water. He got the bottle of shampoo, squirted some on his head, and rubbed. When he was done he looked in the mirror and his hair was pink!

The second is from Emeline:

"Hide me! I look terrible, I'll have to get it cut off!" My friend sobbed when she looked in the mirror. "I know, but you shouldn't feel so bad, cause it'll come out soon," I told her. I don't think it made her feel any better. "the gum is orangy-pink and my hair is changing color!" My friend yelled at me. The gum was orangy-pink. It was a very bright orangy-pink, and her hair was turning pink, too. It also was sticky and felt gross. It was stinky, it smelled like tropical twist. I told her not to feel it!

The students have been hard at work at snapshot writing; both of these student writers painted a vivid picture in my mind!

Homework Project--Family Flag

(all students will receive a paper copy of this assignment)

After learning about the parts of the flag, a history of flags, and seeing lots of flags in class, we will be designing a family flag! Students have received a large sheet of heavy white paper for their flag. Flags should be in color; please make sure they use crayons or colored pencils (but NOT markers); I have extra sets of each (crayons and colored pencils) if you need them to complete the project.

Ideas for the flag include:
 Family’s historical coat of arms
 Symbols representing each family member
 Symbols representing what the family likes to do together
 Favorite family foods, books, etc.
 Colors representing your family (i.e., if your family is Scottish like mine, you could use red)
 Symbols representing your family beliefs
 A banner with a family slogan

Flags are due on Tuesday, September 16th. We will be putting our flags on display in the classroom. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Amy Croel-Perrien

Homework Tips

    Parents frequently ask me for homework help. Here are just a few tips for making homework time easier!

 

• Establish a routine—this involves a regular time for homework each night. In the past parents have commented that times right after school or right after dinner have been good times to complete homework.
  
• Create a work space—Ideally, a flat, uncluttered surface that is well-lit with few distractions.
  
• Provide homework tools—Good to have on hard are pencils and pens, notebook paper, highlighters, glue sticks, colored pencils (preferable to markers), a calculator and a dictionary.
  
• Organization—this involves setting up a space at home where notes and papers go for mom and dad, a place to hang the backpack, and a work space for completing homework. Review the "getting home from school" routine to make sure that kids understand where papers and belongings should go as well as where and when to work on homework.
  
• Be available—Stay nearby to answers questions or provide help as needed. Please offer guidance without giving the answer. They may need time to discuss
  
• (Yes…despite what your kids may tell you, it is okay for you to correct and review completed work!)
  
• Break Time! Kids' attention often wanders after 20-30 minutes. Taking a few minutes break to walk around, get a drink or snack will often help kids recharge and making completing homework easier.
  
• Let Mrs. Perrien know if the homework assignment is especially difficult.

Preparing for fall testing

For the next four weeks upper elementary Montessori students will be participating in targeted reading and writing lessons that will help us prepare to take the MEAP assessments in October. These lessons are simply times where we work together on improving our writing skills and practice different reading strategies.

Students will be learning the difference between writing themes and topics. They will practice responding to writing prompts as well as how to score their own writing and the writing of their peers. We will be focus on developing strong central ideas, adding relevant and interesting details, using interesting words and varying our sentence structure.

We will also be practicing several key reading strategies by using each strategy with different stories—both fiction and non-fiction. At parent night, I will point out how you can tell which strategy we have recently learned.

To make these lessons specific for the different grade levels, I will be focused on teaching the 4th and 5th graders. 3rd graders will be working with Mrs. LeClair, while the 1st and 2nd graders will be going to Mrs. Klinger’s and Mrs. Sale’s classes. This is a great way for us to prepare for the MEAP because these state standardized assessments are grade-level specific. Students will only be in these grade level lessons for one hour per day and only during the month of September.

I am excited about these lessons because they will also be the starting point for our writing and reading studies for the school year. Reading and writing don’t begin or end with the MEAP but the timing of the MEAP is why we do these lessons during the month of September. The MEAP is meant to test knowledge learned the previous school year; however, being out of school all summer necessitates September review.

As we complete our math placements students will also jump into the Montessori math curriculum. Beginning next week you will see math worksheets as occasional homework. These worksheets, combined with our daily classroom work, will also be a way that we prepare for the MEAP assessments.

We are having a great week in school; thanks for all you are doing at home to make the transition back to a school schedule.