I can’t believe how fast last month flew by! We have 2 1/2 weeks before Winter Break! We will be working hard to tie up all of our loose ends before break.
This week in Reading Workshop students continued to research their topics. They learned how to write about their research in a way that helps them to synthesize the information that they are learning. Students met with their groups Thhursday to plan out their posters. Today groups got together to work on and complete their posters. Students will be presenting their research on Monday!
In Writing Workshop students are continuing to develop their personal essays. They wrote mini-stories that give an example for each of their reasons that supports their thesis. Students also learned how to create parallelism in lists as a powerful alternative to writing a mini-story. Next week, we will be working on writing introductions that hook our readers.
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 online 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 next week. Students made vocabulary cards, and took home a review sheet to help them study for the test. We also played a few online Kahoot! and Jeopardy! games, with test like questions that covered the concepts taught, as part of our review. We will be starting our last science unit on the States of Matter next week.
We have also been practicing grammar and conventions each week. last week we reviewed some things we all know, but do not always use – when to capitalize a letter and when not to. We learned terms like proper noun, common noun, abstract noun, and concrete noun. We also talked about when to use “a” and when to use “an.” This week we talked about plural nouns and the importance of having noun agreement in sentences.
Has your child come home saying words like amygdala, hippocampus, and prefontal cortex? We have been learning about the parts of our brain and what the do as part of our “Mindfulness” lessons. Ask your child about these parts of your brain. Last week we talked aboutamygdala, hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex and what the do. Students learned some strategies to calm their amygdala in order to get new information to our PFC and store the important things in our hyppocampus. Today, we learned the difference between mindful and unmindful thoughts and actions, we talked about bringing mindful awareness (focusing attention and withholding judgement) to our lives.
Important Dates
December 14 – Build a Gift
December 21- January 2 – Winter Break
January 3 – School Resumes