This week we will be looking at ways to stay in the present moment. With so much going on around us, we can get distracted and act without thinking. Taking moments to breathe, pause, and focus will help us process and act mindfully.
We will be completing our first expository this week! We've learned outlines with introductions, examples, supporting details, and conclusions. As a class, we developed rubrics to help us evaluate the quality of our work. Our critical friends have been giving KSH (kind, specific, helpful) feedback along the way. We look forward to sharing these this week with parents and administration. You are an important audience and your kids are very motivated knowing you will be hearing their voices. We continue working on compound and complex sentences. Finding conjunctions, commas, subjects, and predicates...that's our jam! In reading, we will be exploring stories of the season. In math, we will challenge ourselves with a new tool with multi step word problems -- strip diagrams. This will provide us with a visual representation to represent problems and understand the operations needed to solve the problem. Students will learn to understand the context of the problem to be able to create a strip diagram that accurately represents the thinking and solving they need to think through. In science, we will look at a new challenge based on the 14 UN Sustainable Goals: clean energy. We will investigate this by critically thinking about infographics, articles, and the design process. On Friday, we will celebrate with a winter party. Look for emails from room parents for details! Hang in there everybody -- we are almost to a well deserved break! Let's finish strong!
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Happy December 7th, families!
A huge thank you to all of you for meeting with us for conferences last week. We were so grateful to have a sliver of time to discuss the progress, growth, and goals for your kiddos! This week we continue to focus on mindfulness and being "in the moment." With so much going on around us and anticipation for the holiday season, we know that it's challenging to stay focused and finish this 2020 calendar year strong. We began our Project Based Learning Inquiry last week. We are learning about how others historically and currently, have adapted to the environment. We also have been looking at examples of change makers - those who spoke up to share their stories. Each of us are creating an expository piece that shares our experience of a COVID world and how we have made adaptations. Lots of fabulous discussions and writing taking place. It is an interdisciplinary project that involves reading, writing, social studies and science. More to come on our presentation of our work! In math, we have jumped into long division with both feet. We've related how our visual strategies relate to the standard algorithm, and how we can represent our understanding in many ways. This week we continue our long division journey. We strive to take our learning from a surface:"I can do it" level to a transfer level: "I can teach others because I really understand it deeply." Our reading continues to explore Biographies and expository text to support us as we are creating our own expositories. We are digging in deeper into compound sentences: two simple sentences separated by a comma and joined by a conjunction. Yes, it's a challenge to keep all these pieces straight. Is this a complex sentence? Compound? When do I want to use a comma? This takes time! In writing we are taking our outlines and creating drafts in paragraph form. BIG WORK! Know that you are an "observer" in our Blend course (meaning you can see but not do any activities), so you can always hop in and see assignments, feedback, and grades. It may be helpful to carve out some time this week as graded work is due next week. Check TEAMS for those grades so far. Thankful for you, your children, and this opportunity to grow strong in 2020. |
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