Lots to Say

Hello,

Please bare with me through this post as there are a lot of things I need to share.

First, thanks to everyone who was able to make it out to the 5K yesterday! It was a lot of fun and we had a good time.

Second, I need to apologize for dropping the ball on our first home project. They are supposed to be due these next two weeks. However, since I failed to remind you and give you specific details, I will accept them up until October 7th. The topic of this home project is “I wonder…” This can be anything your child wants to know more about as long as it is school appropriate. Please help your child research something they are interested in. While doing the home projects, we will be working on eye contact, speaking loudly, speaking clearly, and other good presentation skills.we would like the students to use their poster boards/papers as a guide instead of as a “book” to read to the audience. The pictures should only tell a story or convey information. This helps all of the children have interest in hearing about the topic, be engaged during the presentation, and ask relevant questions afterwards, and in general seemed to retain more of the information presented. More importantly the children feel so proud of themselves when they see the audience react that way!

That said, we would like home projects to be a picto-presentation; meaning that the poster board, power point etc should only contain pictures, which the children then will use as talking points. We also encourage questions by the presenter during the presentation to help spark the audience’s interest. Here is some information about why we feel a picto-presentation would be perfect to get the children started on engaging presentations:

“Firstly, the places where pictograms are used are typically places where there’s a necessity to convey a message quickly, like for example a stop sign that helps to prevent an accident. Secondly, a pictogram needs to be memorable, and since an “image speaks a thousand words”, it serves this purpose much better than text, in terms of memorability. In other words, a pictogram tells a story very fast without someone needing to actually read anything.” -Successful Presentations for Elementary Students

Having your child use a few note cards with their own handwriting and their own sentences or key words that can help them remember what they want to say is a good way to remember their key info. Our goal is for your children to be able to stand in front of a group and re tell the information they learned through their research without reading directly from a typed text or excerpt. We truly believe that learning to speak and share information at a young age enables children to grow into young people that are not afraid to speak, and express themselves in front of a group. This is a skill that when learned at an early age will hugely benefit your children for the rest of their school career. Please take a few minutes at dinner or bedtime to have your child retell to you or their siblings five key points that they think they would like to present to the class when the time comes.

We will be using a simple presentation rubric to help provide feedback for your child. We will send a copy of it home this week. I will also do a small presentation of my own home project to show the kids and example of a home project.

This Tuesday is the first box tops store of the year. Your child can bring in box tops and for every five, get a ticket. The tickets can be used to purchase things like school supplies, water bottles, etc. Please make sure the box tops are cut out and not expired.

We are doing original projects again this year. For these the students create a piece of art and it can then be put onto things such as a pillow, shirt, bag, cards, etc. You can order something with your child’s work on it. The proceeds go towards our classroom. We are using money from last year so we can go on more field trips this year. We made our artwork Friday and it turned out beautiful. I will keep you updated on ordering when I get more info.

Using squash from our garden, we made squash soup on Friday. I got the recipe from one of our amazing parents and she provided us with all the other ingredients besides the squash and we cooked up the soup and had it with lunch. Most of the kids loved it! We were surprised by how many of them ate it and wanted seconds. Here is the line for more.

We are getting a lot of squash from our garden so we plan on making the soup again. I have also had many requests by the kids to put the recipe on the blog so I will do that in another post. We also used cantaloupe from our garden for snack two days this week and we have a lot of cucumbers we will also be using.