Conferences

Conferences are approaching!  Make sure you see the Principal's Blog to sign up!  I look forward to meeting with you all.  Also, as learning is a collaborative effort, I always enjoy it when your child joins us to discuss their own progress.

Teamwork & Collaboration

As a way to analyze the connections between multiple texts, construct a broader theme, and annotate higher level texts, we read three different articles/blogs on teamwork:

A Great Metaphor for Teamwork from Steve Jobs
The Importance of Teamwork - Something I Learned from My Teenage Son
The Goose Story - Teamwork

Reading, annotating, and discussing these three articles brought a great understanding of what it means to be a team and why it's necessary to work with groups.  This also ties into several of our expected outcomes on Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication.  As a fifth grader, our goal is to have kids be able to listen to a different point of view, understand it, and either rebut it or perhaps change their thinking.

Please feel free to have these conversations at home and/or read the articles yourself! =)

Communication

Today we will start communicating weekly about how your child is doing behaviorally in class.  Stapled in their Homework Folder is a pink sheet like the one below.  On it, you will see that I will tell you if they received any Strikes this week or earned a Home Run!  Also, I will record how many Oops Slips they received this week.  I ask that you please sign it over the weekend and it is returned on Mondays.

Thanks for being a team in making this year a success!