Exciting New Happenings!
We have started a lot of new exciting projects. We are practicing keyboarding as part of our morning routine. Students are working through a series of eight lessons that focus on using home-row. Ask your child to show you their home-row. By the time the students are finished with all eight lessons, they will have practiced each letter on the keyboard from home-row. At this point, many of the students' hands are too small to comfortably reach each of the keys, so there is some movement of their hands from home-row. This is ok, but they should always come back to home-row. From now on, I expect them to use home-row when they are typing. You should, too.
In addition, we are practicing handwriting! We are reviewing each letter in class and then practicing. They will do some practice in school and bring the remainder home to complete. You will notice that handwriting has been added to our homework schedule and checklist. At this point, I am not requiring students to use cursive because we haven’t finished all the letters, but eventually I will be asking them to use cursive for certain assignments.
Another project that I’m really excited about is our legend project. I was inspired by something James Rumford told us when he came to read Kahala `o puna to the students. He said about his retold Kahala `o puna legend, “This is not my story, but these are my words.” Because we were already working with story maps to help us organize our writing pieces, I thought it would be appropriate to integrate that language arts work with our Hawaiian studies work. The students were already familiar with mapping because we worked as a class to create a story map of James Rumford’s Kahala `o puna. I had the students read a number of Hawaiian legends on their own. We also read several Maui legends as a follow-up to the HTY play, Maui vs. Hercules. Each student chose a legend that they liked and filled out a story map for that legend. Then, they created another story map of their own version of the legend, which they will be writing. The students and I are all very excited about their versions of the legends. I will keep you updated!
Posted on February 1, 2008 6:59 AM | Permalink