Wierda's Weekly Words - 5/17/2012
Dear Parents and Friends of Ocean Palms,
This has been a week focused on exciting projects and events. Our fifth graders are preparing for their fifth grade awards celebration and upcoming fun day, our long awaited Wizard of Oz musical will be performed tonight, and we continue to teach and enjoy the learning each day. I have had a number of children come up to read to me this week, share their writing samples and book logs, and it has been such a joy. Our children are beautiful, eager to excel, and are some of the brightest and engaging children that I have encountered. I love this job! Our Leadership Team met last week. We accomplished some meaningful vertical planning and creative ideas for teaming and professional development for next year. Our focus will be on creating comprehensive units of study in a variety of content areas with embedded technology that are derived from our Common Core Standards. Our children will surely be in for an exciting adventure as we take them through our units, projects, and even more in-depth learning next school year. The Common Core Standards generate a renewed interest in the types of questions that teachers ask and that children need to be able to answer. These questions are not simply higher level questions but are
called “text dependent”. This means that we as educators, and you as parents, need to begin to ask our children questions that are interesting and generate discussion, that help children make personal connections with the text, and that provide a way to ensure that children have read the text fully and can justify their answers. This new type of questioning and learning also imposes accountability and puts the active learning into the hands of our students as facilitated by our teachers. Our students must read with focus, utilize a variety of strategies to make meaning from text, and then be able to write and explain from the facts and details of the text itself. Our goal is teach these skills and provide the tools that our students need to embrace text dependent questions, deepen learning, but still allow for
the pure joy of reading and learning. We are surely ready to take on this exciting challenge! Our last Book of the Month is entitled The Curious Garden by Peter Brown, and I hope that you will ask your child about it. Feel free to come in and borrow a copy from us and take some time to read and discuss with your child at your leisure in the days ahead. Readers are surely Leaders! Have a wonderful last few weeks, encourage the continued learning, and stop in and spend some time with our wonderful Ocean Palms children when you can!
With Enthusiasm, Betsy Wierda, Learning Leader
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