Episode Two: Opening DaysHello and welcome back to the Mr. D show! I am your host, Mr. D. Last week’s start of school marked the beginning of my 22nd year in education. It was an excellent three-day start and I am looking forward to our first full week together with this year’s crop of Mambas.After meeting the students on Wednesday, I passed out a couple of items that I would like returned to the classroom. One is a parent letter that outlines some generic information about myself and the class - the other is a parent essay where I am asking a parent or guardian to give me the 411 about the students in my classroom. Trust me when I say that this is the MOST important reading I will do the entire school year and I greatly appreciate your input and involvement on this one.  On Thursday and Friday, we got into our Google Classrooms, did a little bit of assessment to see if students could manipulate Google Docs, Slides, Forms, and Drawings, completed the Reading Plus Insight Assessment, and even created some symbolic representations of what was important to us using PlayDoh. Looking back on it, we got a ton accomplished and I am really proud of our progress after only three class periods.We also played a couple of games in class and I want to give a S/O to our winners of our Tower of Teamwork game - table two in Third Period, consisting of Bristol Chism, Bianca Coffey, Will Coffey, and Atticus Dickerson. Well done, guys!This coming week begins with MAP testing, which means our regularly scheduled programming will be delayed until this Wednesday.  Tomorrow, students will report to their first period classes as normal.  However, once they return back to Mambaland, we will go to our homerooms where we will test Reading before lunch and Language afterwards. On Tuesday, we will have a similar setup but we will test Math before lunch and Social Studies afterwards.  After MAP testing wraps up, we jump into class head first with our initial unit of study of the year, We Can Be Heroes. Now, as I told the class last week, ELA is a skill-based class, not primarily a subject-based one. To be clear, we use subjects for common thematic purposes - but we are grading students on their ELA-related skills: their reading, writing, vocabulary acquisition, and such. With our first unit on heroes, we will not read a full-length novel - the time frame prior to Fall Break doesn’t really allow that. Therefore, we will rely heavily on quotes, poems, short stories, and textual excerpts.  We will start the unit with a little vocab - four words to be exact: archetype, concise, imagery, and nuance. We will be breaking down quotes on Thursday and analyzing them through art. Finally, we will introduce students to the story pattern known as the Hero’s Journey on Thursday using a fairly familiar story to serve as our initial example: the Lion King! Shoutout to Simba!That will do it for this episode - thanks for listening and being involved in what your child is doing in class. We are a partnership and I am here to work with and for you on behalf of our community. Here’s to a phenomenal school year - peace be the journey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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