Welcome back

Welcome back to school at Horizon. It's good to see the kids back at school with smiling faces and positive attitudes. This class is already impressing me with their work ethic and quality of questions that they ask throughout the day. I think this is going to be a great year! Here's a little recap of what we have done in our first few days back at school. 

Students will be taking part of Writer's Workshop this year, which means that they received their very own writing notebook. Here you can see the student's decorating their notebooks to personalize it to them. Each picture/photo/drawing had to relate to them in some sort of way. This makes finding story starters pretty easy, since the whole cover is plastered with them! 

One of their first entries into their writing notebooks was a little reflection on what has gone well for them in the past and what areas in writing they felt they could improve on. They all got together with partners and shared their writing ups and downs. We found a lot of common themes such as trouble with introductions and conclusions, trouble finding a way to string little stories together to create a larger one, and being good at telling the stories out loud, but still needing help to make those emotions show up on the paper version of our story. 

Yep, the laptops are in use! The student's have begun setting up their Google Drive Folders, Edmodo accounts, and are learning the basics of the Google Apps. They all went through a two hour tech boot-camp where they rotated between all of the 6th grade teachers and covered everything from proper laptop etiquette (how to handle their laptop, charge it, etc.), and discipline for misuse to how to e-mail properly and how to save files to their own hard drives. It was a lot of information, but we will be reinforcing and working with it all year. In addition, we will be having year-long discussions and lessons about what it means to be a 21st Century Digital Citizen. 

Here you see students participating in a "Get to Know You" activity on the first day of school. One catch ... they could only use one foot to move around the room. 

More collaboration with their writing - sharing the ups and downs of previous years. 

The student's here are participating in a team building exercise where they had two groups coloring the same picture. The twist occurred when the students learned that the pictures had to be colored exactly the same, and that one group could do the talking, the other could only listen (they weren't allowed to ask any clarification questions either). It lead to a great discussion about how precise directions needed to be given and followed, what it takes to be a good communicator and listener, and what it means to be a good teammate. Special thank you to Mrs. Farrow for organizing this exercise and the parent volunteers who helped run the activity.