Susan Stewart's Class

Hello folks, We have had another busy week. Students have worked hard on their self selected writing pieces. About three weeks ago each one chose a piece from his/ her journal that he/she would like to do further work on. The work was to include significant revisions as we were working on a grade level expectaion called Writing Diminesions. Students have revised their work, had conferences, revised again and fine tuned their writings. Their work is impressive.

Another area of hard work has been Vermont Projects during Discovery Time. Students have designed their own projects and are executing them. Projects include a model of the Vermont State House, one of a sugar bush, a Vermont board game, a poster about Calvin Coolidge, a couple of slide shows. We will have another interactive slide show that we can use the 'clickers' for. This is exciting work.

On Wednesday I was at a literacy training in Hinesburg. Our school will be adopting a new assessment tool that aligns very well with the probes we are already using as well as best instructional practices in reading. This tool offers a lot to us in the way of moving children's reading skills forward, and I'm glad we've decided to use it.

Our current Read Aloud book is HOOT by Carl Haaisen. It has been riveting for students.

In math we've been struggling with decimals. The concept of decimals is very tricky for many kids. We are stressing that decimals are always 10 parts to the next greater piece: ten thousandths make a hundredth, ten hundredths make a a tenth, then tenths makes a one, or a whole...It is tricky and confusing.


I hope you all have a great vacation week. Things will be very hectic when we return-so many regular events and then the whole advent of moving. There is also FAP led volunteer opportunities for Teacher Appreciating Week(I hope you got the email I forwarded about this) and for moving.

If you are interested in helping pack up the classroom for the move to WCS, please let me know. I'll be trying to sort, organize and purge next week so that my room at least won't be too overwhelming.

As always, ,please check the Bell for special events. I'll put the ones for Discovery on the right where I used to have homework assignments. Please mark your calendars, and remember the Discovery homepage has a calendar link.

Not on the calendar yet are the Maturation Video for grade 4 students, Science NECAP for grade 4 students and transition events.