Welcome to Room 217 – Sixth Grade!
I am Mrs. Tollett and I’ll be your child’s teacher this year. I’m very excited to continue teaching with such a wonderful staff, community, parents, and students here at Hamblen this year!
Schedule: This year, I have decided to some switching of classes with Mrs. Kirby. Your child will have reading, writing, social studies, and science with me and will have math daily with Mrs. Kirby. We will have a readers’ and writers’ workshop daily as well. For example, in readers’ workshop, I begin with a mini-lesson focused on a thinking strategy. Thinking strategies help us to better understand what we read, which is the key to reading! The strategies to be of focus this year are: Summary, Making Connections (schema), Questioning, Sensory Images (creating a picture in your mind as you read), Determining Importance (finding out what is most important in text), Monitoring for Meaning (being an engaged reader), and Synthesis (pulling it all together). After the mini-lesson, students will then apply these strategies in their independent reading. They will select their own books, check in with me to make sure they are reading books at their just-right level, and then read for approximately 30-40 minutes. During this reading time, I conduct individual reading conferences and work with small groups. To conclude our readers’ workshop, we meet at reflection time to discuss how we applied the strategies and review our journals. Students are expected to write in their journals daily and this will be part of their grade.
Writers’ Workshop will be conducted in the same manner, but focuses on separate units of study such as personal narrative, literary essay, poetry, etc... My students will then go to lunch at noon and return at 12:35. Our schedule also includes Music, P.E., Library, Art, or Band/Strings.
Spelling: I will be following the district-approved curriculum for spelling. Monday through Thursday we will have a word-study session in which we will go over each of the words and their meanings and look more in-depth at vocabulary, etc… These words are added to their personal word walls and are expected to be spelled correctly in their daily assignments. On Friday, we will have a review (quiz) of the words, including several words that we have worked on in the past. This is not a standard list/test approach, so you will not see students bringing home a weekly list of words. Instead, each student will have a list of words in his/her homework folder that he/she needs to work on. These are to be studied at home and will continually be on the tests on Fridays. I’ll send home a copy of the core words we’ll be focusing on at our Open House.
Homework: Each week, students will receive a new reading log on Wednesdays for them to log the title of the text they are reading and how long they read. Parent signature is required and they will be returned each Wednesday as well. For writing, students will receive two spelling assignments per week and any additional homework as it deems necessary. This most likely will entail writing three entries per week in their writer’s notebook. Students will also need to complete math homework given by Mrs. Kirby. Any unfinished daily work in social studies/science may be homework as well. If you have any questions about homework, please contact me at your convenience. There will be no weekly packet, but you will see similar assignments come home each week. Students will fill out a homework calendar each day to keep them responsible for their own work. This is kept in their homework folder along with their individualized list of spelling words.
Other Notes: I am a trainer for our district’s Literacy Program, training teachers in the use of Writers’ Workshop for the intermediate grades. With this, my classroom is open to visiting teachers in our district that take our night classes. Teachers come and observe readers’ and writers’ workshops in our classroom. The observing teachers are only here to watch the teaching and learning, and will not be interacting with the students. In the past, my students have adjusted very well to having additional teachers in the room so I wanted to make you aware of this in case you are dropping by during that time. This typically doesn’t begin until October.
If you need to contact me, please do so by phone at 354-2918 or by email at AmyT@spokaneschools.org. I do not usually answer my phone during class time, so you’ll need to leave a message on my voice mail. I will check my voice mail at all preps and lunch times and return your call as soon as possible. Again, thanks so much! I’m really looking forward to working with your child!
Sincerely,
Mrs. Tollett