It's Friday again, and time for another brief update. The big excitement this week was working on celebrating Chinese New Year with the first graders in Ms. Tremblay's class.  We got together and made red envelopes (traditional Chinese New Year gift) and ate noodles, which symbolize long life.  It was a lot of fun! Meanwhile, we are creating our dragon so that we can "surprise" the school during Assembly on Tuesday. I will be sure to get our dragon dance filmed and post it for you to se. Of course you are welcome to come and watch -- but it will be quick and then we will be on our way to the State House.

The other big news this week was NEAP testing. The students got through it like troopers -- and the only complaint they had was the "racist" nature of the questions about their demographics. It bothered them a lot to be asked if they were white, black or hispanic. I tried to explain that the NEAP testers are collecting this information nationwide to make sure all students are getting equitable education, but this was hard for them to understand.

We didn't have much time to read this week, but I showed the students a few books by the photojournalist Peter Menzel that they were really interested in! The books are Hungry Planet and Material World. Menzel traveled the world photographing families with their food for the week and with all of their material goods. The photos are stunning and the comparisons quite stark.  I love watching these kids gain perspective!

Each student has been assigned a county and has become a representative to Vermont's House. They have researched their counties and become experts on them. Then today we looked at House Bill 10 (an actual bill that our legislature is discussing) which is about keeping Vermont permanently on Daylight Savings Time. Next week, my class (the House) will debate this bill with Mr. Brezic's "Senate" when we have our Mock Legislature.

Today we started working on coming up with persuasive essay ideas. The students really struggled with this until I suggested they think of what issues they see at school, and who they could persuade to change them. Wow!  They had lots of ideas after that -- from being allowed to chew gum to being allowed to protest!  I think we will have some really interesting essay!

Finally, this week we learned about subtraction with regrouping. I am incredibly impressed with how quickly this class caught on!  They are still a little shaky when "borrowing" across a middle zero, but they are getting there!

Have a wonderful weekend!