House 43 Digest Online

The goal of this project is to help your child understand one of the ways historians chronologically organize events of the past. Inherent to this project is also the reality of describing and recording one’s own history – certain events are included and others are not. As we go back in time to study Native Americans before European contact, it is important for the children to understand that what we know about these cultures is just a small portion of what actually happened – certain events were forgotten, while others were remembered and recorded. Another aspect of this project is an emphasis on perspective. Your child’s timeline will be written, for the most part, from his/her own perspective. In class we will develop the idea of historical perspective and discuss how it relates to the history that we study, and especially how it relates to Native American perspectives on events in and around 1500. Your child’s tangible experience of fitting his/her own history to a timeline will inform their understanding of the more abstract concepts of recording history that extends beyond their own birth or even that of their teachers and parents.

We understand that it may be difficult to provide photographs in some cases, and that is fine! If possible, it would be wonderful to include some photographs in the first half of your child’s timeline, as they represent primary records of the events being described. We will discuss the difference between primary records and secondary records in the classroom, too, as we embark on our own study of the past.

PHOTOGRAPH GUIDELINES

Please work with your child to clearly label the back of each photograph (either directly, or with a post-it note) with the corresponding event/year from your child’s timeline.

Ideally, it would be wonderful if you could send in copies of photographs that can be included in your child’s Personal Timeline book. If it is possible to send in a copy, or a printout, of pictures for this purpose, that would be wonderful.

If you are unable to provide a copy for use, you have two options.

• Send in photographs with your child to be scanned and returned. These photographs MUST BE CLEARLY LABELED as needing to be returned to you, as well as with the corresponding event/year from your child’s timeline. We will scan these images and return them to you promptly.

• Email photographs to Julia (jsmith@dalton.org), if they already exist digitally. Again, PLEASE CLEARLY LABEL each file name with the corresponding event/year from your child’s timeline. Please do not send very large files! We will print these images so that they can be included in your child’s book.

Here is some more information about the worksheets. Please read this carefully. If you have any questions, please ask us!

• Each sheet is labeled with a year. Your job is to decide upon a meaningful event from that year. For the events from your early years, you will probably need to speak to an adult to tell you about that time in your life. You will write how old you were when the event happened (was the event before your birthday that year or after?).

• You will also write notes about the event. You should definitely note what happened, and include other details, such as where the event happened, when the event happened, who was with you and why this event was meaningful to you. Remember, you can always ask an adult for specific details about the event, especially for the years before Kindergarten! ☺

• These descriptions are rough drafts – you will have the opportunity to revise them in the classroom, either by hand or on the computer (it will be your choice, so think about which you prefer; we will discuss the challenges and benefits to each choice in the classroom to help you decide).

• For the first five years of your life, you will have the fun and exciting task of choosing photographs for the timeline. Of course, these photographs may not be from the exact moment you are describing, and that is entirely acceptable.

• If you do not have a photograph to represent an event – that is okay! For the remaining events, and any others that you wish, you will create an illustration of the event yourself.

• For the next four or five years of the timeline, you will personally illustrate the events. It is just like your own picture book where you are the author and illustrator. You will begin the illustrations at home as part of the home assignments when we return from Thanksgiving break. You should begin to draw your illustration in pencil. You will have time at school to add color to your drawing. If you have colored pencils at home, you are more than welcome to use them. Your visual representation of the event should be carefully and thoughtfully done.

• Most importantly, have fun delving into the meaningful moments of your past with the people who are close to you!

Personal Timeline Project

Welcome to an exciting project, in which the topic you will be researching is … you! Over the next five weeks, you will be creating a personal timeline to share important events from each year of your life so far. In class we contemplated the question “how can we prove history to be true?” Some of the ways that you came up with included: reading written documents, listening to stories, looking at pictures and art, and examining artifacts. This project will incorporate elements of each of these ideas, as well as another way in which history can be recorded – timelines.

During this project, you will talk with your family and also dig into your memory to recall and describe meaningful events from your own personal history. At the same time that you are writing about these moments, you will also be gathering photographs and creating detailed illustrations to further document your life experiences. Together, we will create accordion books to present and preserve your personal timeline.

Checklist
Planned Date    Activity
11/18/08         Launch Personal Timeline Project

11/25/08         Events and photographs selected for first five years

12/1/08           Complete drafts of first five events

12/3/08           Revise and edit first five events

12/4/08           Make covers and draw timeline

12/5/08           Events selected and illustrations begun for remaining years

12/8/08           Complete drafts of remaining events

12/10/08         Revise and edit remaining events

12/11/08         Draw cover artwork

12/16/08         Final book construction

Gathering Events
The first step of this process will be to decide upon the events that you would like to include on your timeline. While you may have many memories from your recent years, you probably do not have such a vivid picture of what happened in your first few years of life. As a home assignment, you will talk with the people who are experts on these first few years – your families, and anyone who knew you when you were younger. Through asking questions and talking about important milestones and events from this time, these people can help to make these events come alive for you!

As you research your life, through your own memories and those of the people closest to you, think about which events are most important to you. Which moments would you like to include in your personal history? What makes these events meaningful to you? These are the questions you should keep in mind as you are selecting your events. You will choose one event to share from each calendar year that you have been alive. So, if you were born in 1999, the first event on your timeline will be something that happened during 1999, the second will be an event from 2000, and so on, all the way until 2008. If you were born in 2000, your timeline will begin with an event from the year 2000.

You will have a planning packet to help you organize the events that you would like to include on your timeline. On each page of this packet, you will write down notes about one event. Some details you might include in your notes are: What happened? Where did it happen? When did it happen? Who was involved? Why did you select this event? You will have time during Writer’s Workshop to expand upon these notes and compose a short paragraph for each event.

Writing About Events
Once you have selected one event for each year of your life at home, in school you will draft, revise, and edit a paragraph about each event. These paragraphs will be the written portion of your historical document. As you write about your events, think about how you can use language to convey why these moments are important to you and to make them come alive for your reader. Remember, you are writing your own history. What do you want people in the future to know about each of these moments in time?

Collecting Photographs and Illustrating
Pictures are also an important way that we know about things that happened in the past. Looking at photographs from your life might help you to recover some forgotten memories or bring to life moments that feel very far away. Photographs are important documents of the past.

For the first five years of your life you will be working with your family to select a photograph to represent each event that you choose. For the last four or five years of your life, when you most likely have an image in your mind, you will be creating illustrations to provide an artistic record of each event. Artwork, or illustrations, are also a way to bring an event to life. You will begin these drawings at home, in pencil, and you will have time to add colored pencil during school. This is another opportunity for you to represent your personal history from your own perspective. These photographs and illustrations will be the visual record that accompanies your written history.

Constructing Accordion Books
In order to preserve your personal timeline in a lasting format, we will be making accordion books. We will make the covers, and construct the book itself. The front and back covers will each be one piece of cardboard, which you will decorate with colored paper. You will add to your front cover a drawing of an artifact that represents one of the events you have chosen for your timeline. Onto the blank pages of your book, you will draw the timeline itself, which you will label with each year of your life. Once we have all of the pieces – your writing, your photographs and illustrations, the pages of your book and its covers – you will put these pieces together to create a finished product.

Not only are accordion books a lot of fun to make, but, when you unfold the pages you will see a timeline that shows the events that you have chosen for each year of your life. By themselves, each of these events, each page of the book, tells one story about one moment in time. All together, your accordion book tells the story of your personal history – your life so far!

The following information refers to our event next week to raise awareness about taking care of our natural green spaces, as well as raise money to help our friends in New Orleans build a circulation library and reading group book collection. The information on the date and time we are meeting are in the parent handouts given to you privately on email or with your children.

We are excited about parents volunteering for this big event. So, if you are interested please contact us.

An Afternoon to Benefit
New York City and New Orleans
Fall Clean Up at Inwood Hill Park & Isham Park with House 43

Who:

House 43 Students, Teachers and Parent Volunteers

What:

We will join together to clean-up Isham Park in Northern Manhattan by raking leaves, planting bulbs, weeding and laying wood chips

Why:

As an extension of the students’ experiences in Inwood Hill Park and study of our natural environment in New York and beyond, House 43 students will work to maintain one of Dalton’s own cherished green spaces to clean and ready it for new growth in the Spring. These efforts also parallel those of the 3rd grade students at the Lusher School in New Orleans in their attempts to rebuild Louisiana’s natural wetlands through a restoration and nursery project on school grounds. Proceeds of the money collected from the pledges of you, your family and your friends will go directly to the children of Langston Hughes Academy (our current New Orleans buddies) in New Orleans. We hope to buy books for both classroom use and library circulation there.

How:

Please pledge a dollar amount on the attached pledge form for each 15 minute period of time your child works. We expect to work for 2 hours (or eight 15 minute blocks). Your child can place money collected in the attached envelope. Checks can be made payable to The Dalton School. All forms are due on the day of the event, November 12 (rain date: November 17th). All collections are due a week after the event.

To volunteer to accompany House 43 on this special day, please contact Tracy Fedonchik at tfedonchik@dalton.org

As surprise, we planned a Halloween Party for the kids at the end of the day on Friday, October 31. In an effort not to abandon our reflection for the week, the children compiled a list of the activities for the pre-Halloween week. Here is their compiled reflections.

- Wall Map coloring

- Mammal Research – making our paragraphs in hamburger organizers

- House 14 Kindergarten Buddies

- Art: Painting & finishing our portraits and wood working

- Music: Scary Story for third grade only

- Halloween Graph of House 43 Costumes

- Oliver’s Birthday

- Reading Groups: Reading in character’s voices (Reader’s Theater)

- Home Assignments

- Math Packets with a partner learning about addition properties

- Finding pieces to publish in our Writer’s Notebook

- Rounding numbers in Math Morning work

- Lab

- Upper Roof

- Library: Voting for David Weisner books

- Science: Planning our posters for earthworms

- Reading Abel’s Island

- Lunch: Tacos

- Science: Preparing to write our paragraphs on earthworms

- Julia screaming from the prank played by Miss Seiffert

- Spelling – long i

- Keyboarding

- I.R.

- Sharing what we are being for Halloween

- Fact Families in math

- Bar Graphs

- Reading Groups: Filling in our Inference Rectangles

- P.E.: Volleyball and pick game days and soccer

- NOLA Buddy postcards

- House Meeting on Thursday

- Making our own House 43 bar graphs

- Science: Earthworm test

- Free Choice

- House 14 Buddy Story – In A Dark, Dark Wood

- Reader’s Workshop: Scooter and The Search for Delicious

- Our own written reflections

- Math surveys

- Mammal Research: taking notes

- “Why I Like Chocolate” by Nikki Giovanni

- Snack

- Morning meeting