Poetry Unit Home of the Brave & Refugees Algebra Continued This week we began our poetry unit in language arts. We were lucky to have Lyn Hoopes, a former FA parent and awesome poet, come work with us twice this week. She shared some of her photography skills as well as poetry tips and tricks. We were able to use our photos from vacation to inspire our own poems, and it was such a valuable experience. Students will be excited to share their final works with you. We also began a new classroom novel, called Home of the Brave. This is a phenomenal story of a boy named Kek who is a Sudanese refugee. He is brought to Minneapolis (where I lived until I was 11) during winter to live with his aunt and cousin. He has lost his father and brother to war, and his mother is still missing. This story is relevant to our next unit in social studies, as we are going to be studying government, and later, specifically how government policies can affect immigrants and refugees. It also happens to be written in poetry form! We started our unit with Home of the Brave by looking at some photos of the Sudanese people, their homes, and the struggles they were facing in 2014, around the time the story takes place. Here are a few of the photos we discussed below. Through the jarring and moving photos students were given a visual tool to imagine where the main character in the story, Kek, came from. We also read articles related to refugees and shared with the class for morning meeting on Thursday. See below for the articles we read! We continue to work through our unit on Algebra in math. We continued to update our interactive math notebooks with strategies to conquer variable and expression problems, and we even worked with Mrs. H-K's class to mix it up and work on algebra together. On Thursday students worked in stations, playing matching games to identify correct algebra expressions based on sentences and word problems. Students will take a unit assessment on algebra next week. It is that time of year again for the annual Arts and Poetry Night which will take place on Thursday, April 19th. Susan Cogliano and Wendy Goldsmith are looking for volunteers to help hang and display art for this exciting event that will showcase the artwork your children have completed throughout the year. As most of you know, there is an enormous amount of work to display but with enough hands we hope to complete this set up in one day. We will begin at 8:00am on Friday, April 13th and continue working throughout the day. This is also a parent/teacher conference day (so you may be coming in already!). If you are willing and able to donate any time at all to this very worthy cause,
please contact Susan or Wendy. There will be supervised care in the library for children of volunteers (free of charge). Thank you for your support. Wendy and Susan's email addresses are listed below. Susan- [email protected] [email protected] Lastly, I want to let parents know that even though it felt like we just had conferences, I am always available to meet again and discuss the recent progress reports, goals for the remainder of the year, and summer work plans. On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 11 and on Friday, April 13 during the school day I am offering time to meet and conference again. Please let me know if you are interested in meeting during these time slots. However, we can plan on meeting before the end of the year, should you want to wait a bit! I hope you have a joyful weekend, whether you celebrate Easter, Passover, both, or neither! Best, Sarah
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |