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The Shakespeare Sonnet
September 2, 2008
Hello all and welcome to a new school year! It’s been a very exciting day for your children and me and I hope you were able to deal with the loss of your little one without too many tears or too many cheers. You’ll receive newsletters from me quite often throughout the year, at least one a week, so please keep your eyes open as your child brings home his or her papers each day.
Newsletters will also be available online at
matthewdicks.com. Give me a week to get things up and running, and it usually takes me about 24 hours to post the newsletter online.
Contrary to popular belief, I’m not cruel enough to assign your child any real homework on the first day of school, but what I’ve done instead is give you homework that’s very important to get done. Several forms have gone home with your child today, and if you could get them back as soon as possible, tomorrow preferably, I’d appreciate it. In the next week, more will follow, so it’s good not to fall too far behind.
Most important is the medical forms that went home with the youngest child in each family. You never know when an accident can happen. Last year a child had a 103-degree temperature on the first day of school, and five years ago a child broke his arm on the first day of school. Having that medical information is very, very important for our school nurse so that she can treat your child properly if an accident does happen.
There are some tasks that your child has been asked to complete by the end of the week as well:
The most important assignment for your child this week is to sit down with you and discuss a list of goals that he or she will have for the coming year. A great deal of research indicates that people who physically write their goals down are more likely to achieve them, and though this may be correlation rather than causation, it doesn’t seem like a bad habit to start either way.
On Friday I would like your child to bring this list to school so that I can review it with him or her. Though I’d like there to be academic goals on this list, anything is fair game, so goals related to sports, household chores and anything else are fine as well. A list of 3-5 realistic goals is probably ideal, and I may suggest a goal as well on Friday depending on the list. We will return to this list throughout the year, checking in on your child’s progress and perhaps adding goals as the year progresses.
I’m in the process of arranging a field trip to a couple of local colleges, where the kids will have the opportunity to meet students and professors, tour the campus, experience some of the college amenities, and begin focusing their sights a bit on their future. One of the schools will be a community college, where almost any student of any ability or means can attend. It’s where I began my secondary education in 1996 and it was the best education that I ever received. After three years of tuition free schooling at Manchester Community College, I transferred to Trinity College and Saint Joseph’s College as a junior on a full scholarship, thanks to my work at MCC. Any student who works hard can follow this path, and my goal is to let the kids know this now, so that a possible long range future can come into clearer focus for them and they can begin to understand how the choices they make today can impact their future.
It starts with their list of goals for the year.
I’ve also asked your child is to bring in his or her Summer Reading log, which should be done in most cases (in fact, I’ve already received some). This is also very important, because our school must report the percentage of logs turned in to the state, and that figure is published in some horrible public report somewhere. Your child received a Summer Reading log at the end of last year, and if it is lost, your child can simply write the list of the books that he or she read this summer on the sheet that I have provided. All your child needs to do is list the books that he or she read this summer and bring it back to me.
Your child has also been asked to decorate a note card with his or her name and design this evening, as well as his or her homework folder. These both went home today. The note card will be attached to a rack where your child will keep his or her DEAR time book, and the homework folder will go home on Mondays and return to school on Fridays.
I’ve also sent home a list of classroom jobs for which your child is invited to apply. Students can apply for as many jobs as they wish and can be hired for more than one job. An explanation of how this works is attached to the job list. These letters are due on Friday.
Next week we’ll begin our regular homework routine, which will consist of assigning two homework assignments for the week (typically a math and a reading assignment) and two month-long projects (usually a writing and a science project) that are due at the end of the month. Each week the kids will have two nights to work on the weekly assignments and two nights to work on the monthly projects. My goal is to assign meaningful homework that does not unnecessarily burden your child and begins to force him or her to manage time effectively, an essential skill in middle school.
More about this next week!
Over the summer I’ve kept a close eye on Scholastic book orders for sale price books that I planned on using while teaching reading this year, and luckily enough I’ve found three excellent titles so far. Each of these books was only 99 cents! My goal this year is to, when affordable, purchase books for the students rather than having them use books from the fifth grade collection. My thinking is this:
For these reasons, I hoped to find some of the books we normally read in fifth grade at a reasonable price and purchase them for the kid, and I managed to find purchase three so far for your child.
We have also purchased your child a subscription for Time for Kids, which costs $2 per student. It’s a terrific magazine filled with high interest articles that are perfectly targeted to your child’s reading level. So in all, I’ve spent about $5 for reading material for your kiddo so far.
I understand that this method of teaching is a bit unorthodox, so I’m not going to insist that you reimburse me for the books. I also realize that some of the kids might own these books already, so asking you to buy a second copy would be just silly. However, if you were so inclined to send in the $5 to cover the cost of the books and magazines your child will be receiving throughout the year from me, it would be appreciated.
I also want to remind you that we have snack time every morning, so your child should come to school with something to snack on. I will on occasion have something for children who forget their snack, but this will not be the case every day, so please make every effort to send in something for your child to eat.
As I mentioned in my summertime letter, this year we will be trying our best to become a healthy snack classroom. We’ll be taking our first steps in that direction this week by starting to talk about the snacks that the kids have been bringing in so far. We’ll identify some excellent choices and some not-so-healthy choices and will continue to do so next week. By the end of next week, the class and I will have established a list of guidelines that will go home. Please try to follow these guidelines when choosing snacks for your child. Thank you for your support.
Next week students will begin applying for jobs in the classroom, and one of the jobs will be Party Coordinator. The Party Coordinator will create a list of students’ birthdays that are celebrated during the school year. He or she will also ask the students with summertime birthdays to pick a day for their Un-Birthday, which we will also celebrate.
This year, we will celebrate all birthdays, regardless of the day they actually fall on, on Fridays before Town Meeting, in hopes of limiting the loss of valuable instructional time. This means if two students share a birthday in the same week, we will celebrate both on Friday. The Birthday Coordinator will be responsible for calling the child’s parents a week or two before a child’s birthday (or Un-birthday) to remind them about the Friday celebration. Sending in a treat is great (especially if it is a healthy snack), but if you’d like to try something different, your child can give the class an extra recess or alternatives like games, crafts, etc. can be arranged as well. Last year a parent brought in a karaoke machine and a copy of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader and spent half an hour entertaining the kids!
Thanks! Lots more to tell…but so little time!
Have a great night with your homework!
Warmly,