Have a great vacation!

Hello Families!

Here’s a double dose (two week) update!

In writing we are working on informational texts.  Some of the themes we are working on currently are:

• choosing a topic you already know a lot about!
• organizing your information in a variety of ways
• creating several tables of contents to explore the above idea
• determining sub topics for each chapter
• ...and that is as far as we have gotten…

Students continue to write blog posts and to answer questions in writing about their reading.  We have a strong emphasis on RESTATING the question when we are answering one in writing.  We also had students respond to a written prompt on Wednesday.  They we used the same prompt in November to assess their skills and their growth.  There has been a lot of growth!

In fourth grade math we have been learning about area and perimeter.  We have discovered the formulae and what each one means.  Students have worked with measuring tools and with tiles.  We also spent two days engaging in an SBAC practice test.  

In third grade math students have also been learning about area and perimeter.

We have been learning some Geography lately too. It came up recently that most students love maps but didn’t know a lot about geography.  I have also observed that students really want to use Google Maps but need some structure to their use. We started learning about the seven continents last week.  This week we have been finding names of the European countries.  We also found the area of some of those countries.  Next we have studied a huge map of the United States.  Students found the area in square miles for nineteen countries in the US.  We compared those in size and found them on a large map in our Kiva.  We learned about New England and we noticed the four corners area of the south western US.  We will continue with these conversations.

Another fun shift in our work has been sharing books through playing Charades!  So fun.  We brainstorm book titles we all know and then we act them out and guess the titles.  

We will begin reading biographies together after break. Have a wonderfully joyful time with your children over the vacation!  

The week in Review

I have so enjoyed meeting with you and your children during our conferences.  It is always so interesting to see my students show off their place and their work to their parents.  Their abilities to describe their learning and act as hosts is an important piece of their learning.  I also enjoy getting to know each of you more.

As you may know, I was out of the classroom at a math training on Wednesday.  The Guest Teacher is someone who was last in our classroom sometime in 2014, last fall or early winter.  She was really impressed by the growth in the students.  She has a great time with them.  Abe did a wonderful job as the Assistant leading Morning Meetings.

Students have been working on their second persuasive/opinion writing.  This time they wrote about their favorite Red Clover books.  These pieces are almost finished.  Next week we are moving into informational (report) writing.  The blog posts are requiring much less supervision from me.  I can see lots of improvement in the students' writing.  Remember, if you do not see a blog post any week, please ask your student why.  I post all submissions that meet this basic criteria: Titles must have appropriate capitalization,  sentences must have proper punctuation and no run ons, and the post must make sense.  Students are able to revise and submit from home too!

One game we played this week involved naming countries.  I learned that we have not studied enough geography!  Many students do not know the difference between a state, country and continent.  I'll continue infusing our work with some learning about Geography!

In math, fourth graders have begun to study geometry.  They have learned to measure angles, figure out perimeter and today we distinguished between parallel, perpendicular and intersecting lines. The third grade program seems to run parallel to GR. 4.  I'll speak with Ms. Ward for further detail about their work this week.

I feel so fortunate to be working with your children in the remarkably wonderful setting that is WCS.  As teachers here we are often noticing how overbooked we are with incredible community building (Minute to Win It) fun, enriching (Concert, Sound Waves, Engineering, etc.), and important (all of the preceding plus BAND) offerings here.  We are having a ball and learning all the way.  It's a privilege to be teaching in Equinox this year!