Our class won a Pizza Party for decorating their Pennies for Patients box as an awesome owl! So we will have pizza lunch next Wednesday, May 21. I have asked Mrs. Washio to ask for a couple of volunteers to donate drinks or fruit as well. Please contact her if you can help.
Today, at an all-school assembly, we remembered two long-time friends, Mrs. Gail Fukumoto and Mr. Louis Rivera. Both are retiring at the end of May. Mrs. Fukumoto has been teaching at Epiphany-MPI for 41 years! And Mr. Louis has been serving the children for 21 years! They were celebrated with lei, gifts, song, and fond remembrances by students, faculty, and staff. It was a very heartfelt gathering. We will miss them. Please give them your aloha when you see them again.
I want to sincerely thank Sheila Washio for her wonderful job as room mom for our class. She has helped me in numerous ways and has always been so gracious. I hope you will also thank Sheila for all her efforts on behalf of “The Bailie Bunch,” as she has christened us.
Keep in mind that there is no school tomorrow as teachers prepare for student conferences. Next week Thursday, May 22, and Friday, May 23, are Student/Parent/Teacher conferences. I look forward to meeting with each family again. There is so much to share. There is also the sad business of saying good-bye to some of you. What a wonderful group of children and families I have been blessed to know. Thank you for your help in the classroom and at special functions, gifts to the class, books, food, crafts, encouragement, and kindness. You’re the best!
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Congratulations to Mikayla, whose entry in the Kahalaopuna art contest has been used on the publicity flyer and poster distributed throughout the school.
Here is the information you have been waiting for regarding arrival times and costume requirements for your chlldren. On both Friday, May 9, and Saturday, May 10:
• All children will report to their classrooms by 5:00 pm.
• They should be dressed in board shorts or surf shorts, a t-shirt, and slippers.
• Girls should have their hair in a ponytail.
• In the classroom the children will receive their costume bag. They will change their t-shirts into the official program t-shirt provided by the school and their capes or other costuming. They will place the t-shirt they wore to school in their costume bag (with their name on it).
• The teacher will walk the students down to Scudder Hall for warm-up. The children will bring their costume bag with them.
• Upon completion of the opera, the children will return to Scudder where they will change back into their own t-shirts (girls will change in the kitchen area), neatly fold their performance t-shirt and cape or other costuming, and replace it in their costume bag.
* Children will be dismissed from Scudder Hall after their change and parents have signed them out.
Below is a letter sent by the Fifth Grade Leadership Team that I thought you’d like to see.
Aloha kakou!
Hey! Have your heard? Our school, Mid-Pacific Institute, is celebrating 100 Years in Manoa. As a part of our year-long celebration, we are putting on an opera production called Kahalaopuna, Princess of Manoa (this cool opera was written especially for youth by Manoa resident and Professor Emeritus of the UHM Music Department, Dr. Neil McKay).
This opera is really special. The entire production has been managed by us – the students of MPI (with a little bit of help from the teachers and parents)! Our entire elementary school has been working hard for months pulling everything together. We have been involved in rehearsals, costumes, ticket sales, set design, prop making, production, marketing, public relations, and advertising. Plus, the Hawaii Opera Theater has been helping us learn about how a real opera works. They are helping to train the principal singers, which are all played by students. In fact, some of the bigger roles are being performed by our high school students from the MPSA (Mid-Pacific School of the Arts). They’re awesome!
We invite you to attend and tell your friends about our special performance. Our shows are on Friday, May 9, and Saturday, May 10, at 6:00 pm in the MPI Mills Gymnasium. If you would like free tickets for either night, please feel free to call 441-3806.
We really hope you can join us for our special night.
Mahalo nui loa,
The 5th Grade Leadership Team
The MPI Opera Company
Please check the class gallery for new pictures, including some from Kite Day.
]]>Our final inquiry of the year is all about physical science. Concepts include matter, gravity, magnetism, sound, and light. In all cases we begin with what the children know and then move into discovery through investigation. The children have learned that scientists must be good observers and that they must use all their senses to gather information. The children will learn to record the properties of various objects during the Object of the Week activity and will perform various other exercises to heighten their observation skills and awareness of their five senses. We have also been learning to think and write like scientists -- asking questions, making predictions, performing investigations to answer the question, observing, sketching, and recording what we have discovered. The children express their ideas in a variety of ways: journals, drawing, or graphing. They listen, speak, and write about science with their peers and teacher and hopefully at home with you. They are all communicating their level of understanding of concepts that they have developed to date. Ultimately, each experience the students have with science investigations in the classroom does more than teach science content; it also helps to shape student perceptions of what science is and what scientists do. The goal is to shape students’ ideas about science and about how they can work as scientists.
To celebrate our super scientists in first and second grade, we are hosting a Family Science Night on Thursday, May 1, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The Bishop Museum offers a special program called a Festival of Science, and our elementary dining room will be transformed into a “festival” of hands-on science activities. During this “open house”-style festival, students and their parent(s) inquire and experiment together, making fascinating discoveries in Hawaii ecology, biology, health, and anthropology.
Some logistics for the event:
Each 1/2 class will have a potluck from 5:30 to 6:00 p.m. in their respective classroom. Stay tuned for details from your room parent.
The event is JUST for first- and second-grade MPI students and their parent(s). We love siblings, but there is not enough room to accommodate all the parents, students and siblings.
If your child is going to attend, he/she must be accompanied by at least one adult.
Parking will be down by the gym or possibly on the football field.
This is not a mandatory school event.
Please fill out the form sent home today and return it to me by Monday, April 21.
What fun to come back after a nice long vacation to meet again with friends and classmates! As a teacher, I know that the next eight weeks will fly by. Our first day back included a field trip to see the play Ferdinand the Bull put on by Hawaii Theatre for Youth. It was a fantastic interactive production! Many of our students ended up on stage as part of the cast! After the play, the cast came out to talk with the children about bullying, which was a major theme of the play. Our children were thoughtful and articulate in expressing their thoughts and ideas about conflict resolution. We were all so proud of them.
In addition, the class has already begun some new topics of study - biographies, physical science, and ratios - and next week the second graders will begin a new unit on fractions. Our Wailele inquiry will continue through the rest of the semester as well. Just before Spring Break, we tracked the spring water from its pond on campus down to a canal that borders MPI and the University of Hawaii. Then we came back to the classroom and used Google Earth on the Smartboard to track the stream all the way to the Ala Wai and the ocean. The children then drew maps to represent what they had learned. Yesterday, a guest speaker from the Board of Water Supply spoke to the children about the water cycle on our island and ways to conserve water. Oh, and don’t forget, we’re working on an opera, too!
]]>In class, the children have heard biographies read aloud throughout the year. Now, the first graders are writing their autobiographies, and the second graders are writing biographies of their classmates.
In addition, the second graders have started a reading and writing project as part of their homework this month. After reading and taking notes on a biography of their choice, the children are required to complete a multigenre research project. According to Camille Allen, author of Multigenre Research Paper, multigenre refers to “composed of many kinds of writing...The best way I can describe a multigenre paper is to say that each piece in the paper utilizes a different genre, reveals one facet of the topic, and makes its own point. The paper is a collage of writing and artistic expression with an overarching theme that engulfs and informs the reader.” As part of the assignment, the children are required to write at least three different forms of writing to convey their understanding of the person studied. Among the choices are a diary entry, an obituary, a postcard, an award certificate, a newspaper article, an "I am" poem or an acrostic poem, or dressing up as the person and conveying their thoughts and feelings. They will present their projects to the class using all they know about presentation skills and creating artistic, effective visual aids.
The multiage first and second graders' inquiry into the spring on the MPI campus has resulted in questions, hypotheses, interviews, poems, paintings, plays, and more. Last week all the 1/2 multiage classes went down to the spring to meet Mr. Hank Howlett, who has been the Director of Facilities and Maintainence at MPI for many years and has a wealth of knowledge about the grounds. The children came prepared with a batch of questions that have emerged as they continue to construct their understanding of the area.
Upon returning to the classroom, the children reflected upon what they learned...
Tomorrrow we will walk the path of the water from the spring to a drainage ditch located between MPI and the University of Hawaii. From there it flows to the Ala Wai and then out to sea. On Monday, some of the classes will hear from Ms. Graves and Mrs. Montes, two sixth grade MPI teachers and parents, who will share what their sixth graders have discovered about life in Manoa during ancient Hawaii, life about the time MPI was founded, and Wailele as it was in the past.
As part of the inquiry into the spring, the 1/2 teachers have been videotaping the different processes and are excited about producing a podcast for the first time as a demonstration of student learning.
The students progress through the following strategies for solving addition and subtraction problems (Investigations, 2008):
Counting All
Some students need to build a model or draw a picture to visualize the problem and model the action. For example, in a problem about birds flying away (25-11), they may draw 25 birds or tallies and cross out 11 of them and count the number left. These students see the problem as a collection of ones. The goal is for them to develop mental representations that allow them to work with groups.
Counting On or Back
These students can keep a quantity in their mind and count on for addition or count back for subtraction. This requires the child to keep track of the numbers she is counting and how many numbers she has counted. For example 25 + 11 count 26, 27, 28, 29, 30...35, 36 or 25 -11 count 24, 23, 22, 21 20...14.
Numerical Strategies
Counting on or back eventually leads to more efficient strategies as students learn to count on / back in chunks. 25 + 10 = 35 + 1= 36. As students gain more understanding of the place value system, they apply this knowledge as they add and subtract. For example, in 25 +11, the students learn to break apart numbers into 10s and 1s (20 + 5 + 10 + 1), combine like parts (20 + 10 = 30, 5 + 1 = 6), and then combine 30 + 6 = 36. This place value strategy is often done mentally as students become more fluent with number combinations.
Notating strategies (showing their work) is an important extension of oral explanations. One thing I watch for is students who record a strategy because it is easy to show on paper or because they have seen someone else do it, but are unable to explain it to me. For example, I’ve noticed some of the children have some understanding of exchanging or “borrowing and carrying,” as you and I were taught, but they show no clear understanding of the concept when asked to explain the process. In a problem like 25 + 18, a child will tell me, “First I added the 5 and 8 and I put the 3 here and then I put the one here.” When asked why, I often get a shrug. This tells me they have memorized an algorithm but have no understanding of the place value concept involved yet. I don’t know about you, but this is how I was taught math pretty much throughout my elementary years. In Investigations, the math program we adopted this year, the conventional or traditional strategies, including the U.S. standard algorithms for addition and subtraction, are taught in Grades 3, 4, and 5 along with a focus on achieving computational fluency. While introducing these strategies now may be right for your child, please check for understanding and just as important their ability to use another strategy to solve the problem. Some of them tend to stay with the one strategy that is comfortable for them without developing their skill with other problem- solving methods. For example, in the second semester, children solving addition or subtraction problems should have moved passed counting all and should be able to conserve the larger number and count on or back with ease; some will be working entirely with numerical strategies.
The focus throughout is on how the students can represent their mathematical thinking and how different strategies are related.
This math program is new this year to teachers, students, and parents at our elementary school. We all have some new tricks to learn! I have included in today's Thursday envelope examples of a variety of ways the children are learning to problem solve. These are copied from the Investigations Student Handbook, which you may check out from me at any time. Please look through it and save it in your math file for future reference.
I hope this gives you more insight into the math your children are doing and why. Your help at home is always appreciated. Checking for understanding, using the “teachable moment,” or following up with enrichment activities are valuable ways to stay connected to your child’s progress.
]]>This year Mid-Pacific Institute celebrates its 100th anniversary. There are many activities and events planned throughout the coming months to commemorate the occasion. In conjunction with this, the multiage first and second grade classes are deviating from our planned inquiry study a bit. We will continue the historical focus of another place and time; however, we will be looking locally at our own Manoa Valley community, specifically the natural artesian spring, known as Kawailele, found on our campus.
Most of the children were unaware of the spring and its pond on our campus, so we began this inquiry by taking each class down to this “special place” to explore, discover, and wonder. The children wrote and sketched their impressions in their journals. We took some time to play the silence game, using all our senses to gather information about the area. Later, in class, we recorded our observations and questions. Here are some things they are wondering about:
• Why did they put a pond there?
• How did the pond get there?
• Did the water come from the clouds or is it man-made? Or does the water come from the ground?
• Why is there a fence around the pond?
• Why is there a drain?
• Are there dead people under the big rock?
A few days after our visit, I asked the children to draw a bird’s-eye view map of Manoa Valley as they know it now, and label what they could. Yesterday, we used Google Earth to take a virtual tour of Manoa Valley and the spring area. We were able to clearly see the walls of the wide valley and trace the stream to one of the waterfalls at the head of the valley. The children noticed the valley was pretty much covered in buildings and roads. Again they wondered, “What did the valley look like before the buildings and roads were here? How did it look when the ancient Hawaiians lived here? What were the animals that lived here?”
And so we take off on our newest inquiry, based on the children’s questions and the teachers’ guidance. It is our goal to provide the children with a geographical, cultural, and natural history perspective of the valley over time. We also want to instill a sense of pride and stewardship for our natural resources, Kawailele in particular.
I am planning a class hike to Manoa Falls on Wednesday, February 6. We will take Mr. Louis’ bus, leaving school at 8:30 a.m. and returning around 11:00 a.m. If you would like to accompany us, please let me know. It will be a blast!
Happy New Year, everyone! It’s so great to be back in school. The children were so happy to see their friends and exchange stories about their holidays. Our first week back brings us some new challenges and opportunities. The first grade children are using handwriting paper with smaller spaces between lines. They will no longer be using their blue homework journals. I’ll provide new ones for them soon. The second grade children have been introduced to cursive handwriting and will be practicing the lower case letters throughout this semester. It is not an expectation that they use cursive hand writing in their daily writing in second grade, although many will want to try as they learn more letters. They will also be introduced to college-ruled paper and how to properly use the space for their letters. This will be a gradual transition as, developmentally, some have more fine motor control and attention to detail than others.
The children have also been given the opportunity to choose their seats in the lunch room. As you may know, during the first semester they gradually lost all choice in seating because of disruptive behavior. The teachers have agreed to let them try again because we believe that lunch is a great opportunity for rich social interaction and a natural arena for practicing social skills. I told our class that with freedom comes responsibility. I believe they can use their good manners and make good choices. I believe they will include others and help those who look like they need a friend. You might want to ask them how it's going. I think they’re delighted.
Both readers and writers generate ideas, organize, monitor, problem-solve, and revise. In both reading and writing, the goal is to construct meaning. Reading contributes to students' writing development, and writing contributes to students' reading development.
At MPI, students are involved in reading and writing experiences daily. Some experiences are independent, while others are oriented toward the whole group.
In our class, the students listened to the story Snowmen at Night, by Caralyn Buehner. They were then invited to write their own snowmen stories. The focus was on creating a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. As always, they followed the writing process: prewriting (planning), drafting, revising,editing, and publishing. In this case, they all were required to use their best handwriting. The stories are almost done, and today we started making illustrations for them. They should be up in the classroom some time next week. Stop by and take a look.
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