Monday Musings: The First Full Week of Teaching, January 2019

As I look ahead to our first full week of teaching in 2019, I recognize that it's going to be a very busy week.

Curriculum efforts include a heavy focus on the nuts and bolts of division and continued emphases on reading, physical science standards, math assessments, and small group math review sessions. For science, students will explore the conservation of matter as they discuss, model, measure, and study phase changes. Students will also review past science exploration efforts and new explorations to determine whether chemical changes occurred or whether the matter changes were physical only. I'll try out the single point rubric as a way to direct student study and offer meaningful feedback.

In math we'll look at the metric system and notice how it is a base-ten numeral system. We'll apply the rules of the base-ten numeral system we've learned to metric measure as we multiply and divide millimeters, centimeters, meters, and kilometers by powers of 10. Later students will explore division more by learning the traditional algorithm and checking their work. Next week we'll dig into these concepts deeper with hands-on division exploration and problem solving.

Students will continue reading their books of choices this week as well as attending reading/writing classes and many specialist classes and events including music, art, physical education, technology, library, and the school's annual winter chorus concert.

It's a busy professional learning week as well. Today I'll meet with a town water expert to discuss ways that we can teach students more about water conservation. This is a great match for the environmental studies we're doing as well as our physical science emphasis on matter. On Wednesday meet with our rivers study grant team at Drumlin Farm to review what we've done so far and then make decisions about next steps. Finally on Friday we'll make time to review students reading/writing education as we focus on ELA efforts.

We'll also send out our newsletter and begin collecting permission slips for upcoming theater and STEAM-related field trips--good trips that will break up the cold, dark days of winter. Onward.

I look forward to this busy week--it's important to stay the course, keep the energy strong, and be there for the students. Onward.