Halloween

Happy Halloween! Thanks to Ms. Malissa for organizing and running such a fun Halloween party.  Thanks to everyone who donated items for the party for us. We all had a lot of fun! Visit our crew Halloween photo album to see our photos of the day. Please feel free to add any photos that you took this morning, too.

Halloween Photo Album

What is an Expedition?

I have to confess that this is a challenging topic to write about because it is so big and difficult to explain. I have been learning about Expeditionary Learning for more than 10 years and I am still learning new things. But here goes...

First, I would recommend checking out these two resources:

Renaissance's Website Page about Expeditionary Learning - This is a wonderful and short explanation of Expeditionary Learning - not one of my long rambling explanations. By the way, if you don't use the school's website very often, I suggest that you check it out. I use the A to Z tab all the time to find things all the time. Our web designers did a great job.

Design Principles - Core Values of Expeditionary Learning - This short list will tell you all about the things that I love about Expeditionary Learning. I get inspired every time I reread this list. Please be sure to check it out.

So now that you have a bit of background information about Expeditions, I will try to explain Expeditions in first grade. Our first Expedition is primarily based on Social Studies standards. It aligns with the state standards for first grade but includes much more. We are trying to answer these questions:

· What is a family?
· How is my family the same and different from others in the classroom?
· How are families the same and different in the past and present?
· How are families the same and different in other places in the world?

While we are answering these questions, we will try to take a deeper look at diversity in the world. A regular first grade unit on this topic might talk about holidays around the world and touch lightly on one holiday and how it is experienced in 5 or 6 countries. In Expeditionary Learning we choose one topic (in this case a country) to study deeply and develop an understanding of how people are similar and different around the world. We will talk about other cultures as they come up but our deeper focus will be on China and how families there are similar and different from us.

So if you were to come into our classroom during our "Expedition" time, it might feel like a regular social studies class but if you listen to our discussions you will see/feel the difference. We talk about taking the perspective of other people, we talk about the words same and different and try to see that those words can have judgement added to their meaning if we aren't careful, we will talk about skin color, languages, writing, communication styles, social justice and understanding.

At the end of our study of families in China we will have 2 fieldwork experiences where the crew will get to put some of their new learning into action. We will go to Joyous Chinese Cultural School where we will have sessions on Cooking (making our own dumplings for lunch), The Art of Papercutting, Calligraphy/Chinese Character Writing, and Chinese Dance and Kung Fu - all taught by teachers from mainland China. The other experience will be to visit Pacific Ocean Market, an Asian market. While visiting both of these places the crew will be practicing their new learning about how to interact with others respectfully, how to experience and enjoy another culture, how to be patient when communicating with other people with different languages and accents and much more.

So while it can look similar and be similar to regular teaching practices, it goes much deeper and includes much more. I hope that you will see the difference as we move through the study.

You will definitely see the difference as your child moves up the grades at our school. As the kids get older and can handle more academic content, the Expeditions become more complex and they are phenomenal. Ours is very good but I am always so impressed with the Expeditions at the upper grades because they can read, write and discuss topics at such deep levels. You will be, too.

Mathematical Thinking

We are learning to share our ways of looking at mathematical situations and ways of solving mathematical problems with each other. We are noticing that most of the time there is more than one way to solve a problem or look at a situation. When we listen to each other explain how we figured something out we learn new ways to think about things. This helps us to be mathematically flexible which helps us not "get stuck" when working on math problems. Below are some photos of one way that we look at a mathematical situation - seeing dots on dot cards - in different ways.

We have been doing a short (5 minute) daily activity that involves looking at dot cards. I flash a dot card picture (as seen below) to the crew for a few seconds. After I cover the picture, I ask the crew what they saw. They then tell me how many dots they saw and how they saw it. We have several students share how they saw the dots. Here are a few examples:

One student saw this as the same configuration of dots on a domino. She knew that this was 8 because this is how 8 appears on a domino.

Another student saw this as a row of 3, a row of 2 and another row of 3. He said that 3 + 3 + 2 = 8.

Another student saw the 6 dots on the sides like they are arranged on a 6 domino. She then added the two dots in the middle to get 8.

The next student saw the 3 + 2 + 3 =8 pattern but she saw it in columns instead of rows.

Another student remembered that we had previously seen a 9 dot arrangement on a previous day and noticed that this was the 9 dot pattern with one dot missing in the middle so it had to be 8.

Why do we do this? I explained to the crew that it is similar to reading - we can "sound out" every word we read but that would not be efficient. We need to have a bank of words that we just know so reading can move along quickly. This is true in math, too. We need to have strategies to deal with numbers so we don't have to count every dot to know how many dots there are in a pattern. We become more efficient using numbers.


This activity also helps us be able to break numbers apart into chunks that are easier to work with in our head. This makes us more flexible when adding and subtracting numbers. We will eventually begin to move on from dot cards and to visualizing numbers and basic addition and subtraction facts. Having the dot patterns in our minds can help us make that transition.

One other reason to do this short, daily activity is that it stimulates our creativity. We begin to look at things in more than one way. This helps us be open to finding more than one solution to our problems.

Important Dates
10/30 Halloween Costume Parade and Party 9:00 am
11/6 Our crew hosts the Beat 9 am
11/11 No School ~ Professional Development Day for Teachers
11/18-11/22 Climbing Week ~ Sign up to belay here: Fall Climbing 2019. Sign up for belay training here: Belay Training
11/18-11/22 Book Fair
11/25 Vision and Hearing Screenings
11/27-11/29 No School ~ Thanksgiving Break
12/6 Fieldwork ~ More details coming soon
12/23 Winter Break Begins

Helicopter Landing on Our Playground

Yes, it is true. A helicopter did land on our playground today. This was part of the Red Ribbon drug awareness program. The National Guard Joint Counterdrug Task Force spoke to students from our school about staying away from drugs and making good life choices. Ask your child to tell you all about it.

Design Principles of Expeditionary Learning Illustrated

At our Listening Conferences this year, I gave you a list of the design principles our school is based on. I love these principles and have them posted in our classroom. Over the break, I decided that I should "illustrate" them for our crew to help them understand why we do what we do.  I added photos of our crew modeling each principle. Check out our display below.

Gallery Walk

We started our second case study for our We Are Family Expedition. We will now be taking a deeper look at families in another culture (along with continuing to learn about the families in our own crew). Because we have so many great resources in the Denver Metro area that go along with our study, we chose to take a close look at families in China. We will compare how families in China live to how we live to find similarities and differences. It will be very interesting! We began our study with a Gallery Walk and took a look at some artifacts from China to immerse us in the culture and generate lots of questions and a "need to know". There were so many interesting items to see. Check out the photos below.