Last week’s morning meetings about focus led to insightful conversations among our 4th grade TEAM. Students had ideas to share about how they manage time, work space, and “tune in” to learning while “tuning out” distractions when needed. This week we’ll continue to support creating those strong work habits. Your students know that their work products (digital or paper) matter. Much of our work is shared in small group meetings and teachers are working hard to provide timely, personalized feedback with each work artifact in BLEND. So many of you are building time into each afternoon to review that all assignments were completed and that the work reflects your student’s best effort. We so appreciate that support as students learn to navigate the BLEND learning environment.
Readers this week will continue to think deeply about characters. Students should be able to name the characters in the just right book they’re reading independently and list character traits with text evidence for those traits. Those traits help us to predict a character’s actions and help us to notice how characters change. We’ve also been noticing that a character’s learning is typically what the author wants us to learn, so this work of investing in our characters supports us to make inferences about theme. We’re having such rich conversations about books with your students during small group meetings and we know they’re working hard to invest in their characters when they read independently, too. Writers are thinking about the power of each word and punctuation mark they use. We’ve been sharing our personal narratives and getting to know our community of writers in the process. Students are engaging their growth mindset as they give and receive kind, specific, and helpful feedback. This helps each student to revise their piece so it provides detail where needed and tells a clear story for their audience. We’re starting a grammar routine called Power Revision that helps writers to become more intentional about their craft, so look forward to hearing more about that soon! Our mathematicians thought deeply about a word problem solving process that we call UPS check. We spent time in small math groups considering the importance of each component and how it helps us when we’re solving a word problem. This week your student will practice once again with their small group and then show their understanding by solving a problem on their own. Our process starts with a deep understanding of the problem, classifying the information in the problem into what is known (WIK) and what we need to know (WINK). From there we create a plan that translates the relationships in the problem into a math equation. Our solve steps are each written out, then checked with a different strategy. Our final step is to show that we understand with a solution statement. This is big work and we had thoughtful conversations last week about how this is a process that will work on many complex problems, so it’s an incredibly handy tool. We loved classifying and describing matter by its physical properties last week. Matter riddles were a highlight and students were so excited to share with their friends! This week we’re moving into social studies and considering our country’s founding. We’ll think about what America stands for through the lens of the Pledge of Allegiance and will learn some history as we discuss the purpose of the Declaration of Independence.
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