We have been working hard  these last few days to get all of our loose ends tied up before break. Next week will be a quick 4 days culminating in with our class Christmas Party! Next week we will be taking the final Math test on long division on Thursday. The snow day this week set us back a day. Hopefully, all of the students pass the practice test and we don’t have to give the final test at all.

This week in Reading Workshop students have continued to research their topics. We learned how to write about our research in a way that helps us to synthesize the information that we are learning. Students met with their groups today to plan out their posters and to begin to work on their individual part of the poster.

In Writing Workshop students are continuing to develop their personal essays. We wrote a mini-story that give an example for each of our reasons that supports our thesis. Students also learned how to create parallelism in lists as a powerful alternative to writing a mini-story. Yesterday we worked on writing introductions that hook our readers. We followed a recipe of Hook. Hook. Thesis, reason 1, reason 2, reason 3. Ask your child if they remember their hook.

Math this week was all about long division! Students learned how to use an area model to divide, how to use the partial products method to divide and today they learned the “old school” short cut. (This is the method you and I learned in school). Please ask your child to show you how all three methods work. We will be practicing one more day (Monday), before our practice TEST on Tuesday.

Students took their test for our Science unit Organisms in Their Environment on Thursday. I am hoping to have these graded and handed back before break. Students made vocabulary cards, and took home a review sheet to help them study for the test. We also played a few online Kahoot! games, with test like questions that covered the concepts taught, as part of our review. We will be starting our unit on the States of Matter after break.

A HUGE thank you to all that quickly donated raffle items for next Thursday! The students are super excited about the raffle!

Important Dates

December 23- January 2 – Winter Holiday Break

School Resumes – January 3

What a cold snowy week! I have a few students who were certain that today would be a snow day. I do think we will be getting a lot more snow tomorrow though!

In Reading Workshop this week students were grouped in to research teams. Each team is researching a different form of Extreme Weather. Students created a research plan and divided up the work based on subtopics the group decided to research. We have talked about taking notes from what we read and summarizing it into our own words. Students have also worked on synthesizing information from different texts. They asked “How does this new information support or change what I already learned?” When reading a second or third text on their subtopic. Groups will be creating posters to present what they have learned to the class.

This week in Writing Workshop we have continued to develop our personal essays. Students have chosen a topic that is important to them and have supported their opinion with three reasons. Students are now writing mini-stories for each reason to give an example that supports their reason. We also had the opportunity to visit Ms. Burdis’s Kindergarten and help the kindergarten students write letters to the North Pole.

We began the week in Math with an Onlin Assessment that covered the first 4 Topics we have studeied this year, ask your child to share their results with you on their iPad. We then started Topic 5…Division! It is absolutely imperative that your child have instant recall of their basic multiplication and division facts (through the 12s) as our math gets more challenging, those that struggle with basic facts have a very difficult time. (Basic fact matery is a 3rd grade skill).

We are wrapping up our Organisms in Their Environments unit in Science. Students will be bringing home Science vocabulary to study tonight and a Review sheet to study from on Monday. Our SCIENCE TEST will be on Wednesday next week. As our unit comes to an end we are looking for homes for a few guppies, African Dwarf frogs and snails. These animals need a fresh water habitat (aquarium). If you would be interested in your child bringing home a new pet, please let me know. I hope to find homes for all of them before Christmas.

We have also had a number of other great activities that we participated in this week. Mrs. Smits taught us all about our brains and what we can do to grow them! We even made our brains from candy and whipped cream and ate them! We are working hard to develop a growth mindset in all of our students! We helped the kindergarten classes make fleece tie blankets for the People Center and we participated in The Hour of Code! Students learned the importance of Coding Jobs now and in the years to come. Every student knows how to code! Check out code.org if you too would like to learn more! We also created our Build a Gift craft! Thank you to all of the fabulous parents that came in to volunteer!

Don’t forget to check out our pictures below.

As always you can get your child’s take on their week by checking out their student blog at: Kid Blog

Important Dates

Friday, December 16 – Honors Choir Caroling

December 23- January 2 – Winter Holiday Break

Our Week in Pictures