The days just seem to get busier and busier. This morning students had Gym, announcements, devotions/prayer, Reading Rockets, Spelling and Home Letters . . . and that was all before recess!

The kids did a really good job with everything today. They worked hard and got a lot accomplished. In the afternoon, we had a wonderful class meeting. I don’t know if the students have told you about our class meetings. Typically occuring on Fridays, we all get together in a circle. We then greet each other, practicing how to shake hands and look each other in the eyes. This is a tough skill for students but very important as they grow up and enter the work force. We then play a couple of cooperative games. To finish off the class meeting, we go around the circle discussing the good things that have happened in the class and applauding students who have done those things. After, we go around the circle once again and discuss issues the students may be having. As those items come up we try to help each other come up with strategies that they can use to help them deal with those issues. This gives students the means and ability to try and solve problems they typically deal with during the day. We want to build the students confidence and tools to deal with problems in the world.

If you are practicing basic facts with your child and have an internet connection (which obviously you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this), there is a great site where you can create pages of math facts you can print out and use with your child. The site is called Math Fact Cafe. A very useful site for you. I will place it in the side column for you.

To end off, I saw a neat video on a great site called TED. This site has a series of speeches from the great thinkers of today. You may remember the one on children and creativity. This video is entitled “5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Children Do”. I’m not sure I subscribe to it all but it was funny and had a couple of good points.

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