Mr. Madden's Class - Harmony Team

Has anyone noticed your child struggling with Motor Planning?  You might hear of motor planning referred to as praxis.  Praxis aka Motor Planning requires observing and understanding the task (ideation), planning out an action in response to the task (organization), and the act of carrying out the task (execution). A difficulty with any of these areas will lead to dyspraxia in many skill areas.  Dyspraxia can be a result of poor sensory integration, visual difficulties, fine motor and gross motor coordination and ability, neural processing, and many other areas. I've noticed students who would benefit from practice in this area and if you think your child might here is some more information about what it is and ideas for practice. Reminder about our Open House next week: Wednesday, December 20 @ 8:00-8:30 .  We have many parents bringing snacks and drinks, thank you!! Plan to read your child's writing and have a tour of the work happening in the classroom. Ever won

The Harmony team is planning an open house on Wednesday, December 20th from 8 - 8:30am .  This will be a short celebration of student learning and growth that will include some "Small Moment" narrative stories to read and you might even play a math work place game or read a book with your child. If there are any adults who would be willing to bring in some breakfast snacks or drinks that would be great way to add to the festivities.  Let me know if you want to contribute to the following list: Paper plates, cups & utensils Juice, cider, milk or other healthy drinks Fruit "Bready" items (bagels or breads) Thank you for working on the Sight Word lists with you child. Another easy way to practice these is to have kids copy each word down on index cards and then you can use them like flash cards.  Here is an article I wrote about how to do flash cards with students for math facts but the same research applies...use what they know to learn what they don

Last week I began to administer sight word assessments that revealed a need for most students - practicing sight words. I'm linking two documents here that will provide what you need if you can find the time at home to work on automatically recognizing these 150 words. They comprise a large percentage of  words encountered in text and when students have to stop and use strategies to figure out these words it impacts fluency and more importantly, comprehension. Sight Words Learning Sight Words - practice ideas  We continue to work on working together and improving social interactions in our tribe here at school using social thinking as a backbone for developing empathy. We talked about how others are thinking when people do and say certain things and created a public record to remind us what is important when working in a group of 17.  Here is what they came up with Friday to address some behavior that was negatively impacting our learning: