Almost all students have had a recent BAS (Benchmark Assessment System) assessment this past week. Information about instructional text levels, fluency, comprehension and reading rate was collected, and is used to inform reading instruction. We are participating in the whole-school read of Rules by Cynthia Lord. We submitted our first blog posts, and we’re going to be exchanging our blog link with Swift house to encourage a cross-grade level discussion and writing quality blog comments to a wider audience.
As unit 3 draws to a close for third grade students, we finally explicitly taught students the traditional algorithm (or “carrying”) for multi-digit addition problems. Much time was spent this week evaluating the reasonableness of an answer when comparing to an earlier estimate. Finally, third graders are getting lots of opportunities to practice telling time and determining elapsed time during number corner! Fourth graders have been looking at comparing and converting decimals and fractions. They have been focusing on constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others. To prove their thinking, they use base ten pieces or quick sketches. The base ten pieces are a powerful model for decimal numbers. By using them to model different numbers and justify comparisons of those numbers, students are developing a deep understanding of decimal numbers and our base ten number system. We have also checked in on their fact fluency with one minute benchmark assessments.
On Tuesday of this week, all students completed a pre-assessment for our newly launched persuasive writing unit. All students wrote a brief persuasive piece to support the claim: "WIN should be a Free Choice block." Well, almost all students wrote and delivered a persuasive speech on this topic. One student presented the opposite claim and arguments to support it!
Engineering: This was our final week having a formal workshop with Mr. Harmon and Mr. White, the engineers in residence. We were able to learn about timbre - or the voice of an instrument - with some student demonstrations of musical instruments. We connected what we learned about the travel of sound waves to various solids and liquids - which will be the topic of our next theme study! Ask your child how his/her kalimba is coming! The culminating work in the Dining Room on Friday allowed students to experiment with many instruments and use iPads to display various frequencies. We are so grateful to the Create it Lab engineers, http://createitlab.org/ and to FAP for its support of this work.
Other: Report Cards will be sent home with students Friday, 1/23.
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