Good afternoon!
Room 15 was very busy this week! We completed and publsished our personal narratives and enjoyed sharing with friends and family during our Celebration of Writing on Wednesday! .We appreciate all of the feedback given to the students on their hardwork ! They were very proud to show you where they had started and how far they had come! A huge thank you to Mrs. Fuller. our literacy coordinator, for helping to provide me with different mentor texts to teach different lessons during our narrative unit! When students see an author's craft in their writing, it helps them to make the connections to their own! Our editing took on a whole new level!! Now we will be shifting gears from personal narratives to informational writing. Students will become an "expert" on something and share their expertise through their writing, this is usually a really fun piece! We finished up our first Reading Unit on THEME this week as well. We have few more culminating activities to finish up before Thanksgiving break, but we have learned a great deal about looking for the theme or lesson in the novels we read. Great discussions were had as students discussed the different books they were reading and the themes they had found. We also discussed books we have read as a class and shared that books can have more than one theme. These were great conversations! Students have been comparing and contrasting themes in different books as we make connections to our writing as well! We will be moving to Non-Fiction after Thanksgiving break where we will read lots of different articles, paying attention to the different text features as we read. Students will learn why authors use pictures, captions, bolded words, charts, graphs, maps etc as they write their nonfiction pieces. We will also be kicking off our next round of literature circles. On Tuesday, we will be having a "book tasting" in Room 15. Students will make their way to four different tables where they will be asked to review 4 different historical fiction novels. They will look at the cover, read the back cover and any other reviews or information contained within the inside few pages. After reviewing they will jot down some notes about their thoughts on each book. Once we have made our way and tasted all four books, students will be asked to make a reflection on the books. They will indicate which books they might be interested in reading. All students will choose at least 2 of the titles and I'll create groups based on their choices. Giving them some choice always helps to engage them in the process and helps them focus on trying to get as much out of each "table reservation" as they can. Books will be distributed after Thanksgiving break and we will begin digging in! Our focus will be on character traits and how character problems often help readers figure out the theme! In Math we have started working with division. We started by looking at division using multiples of 10, 100, 1000s. Students find the basic fact and use what they learned during multiplication to help them figure out the appropriate place value. We have also looked at using rounding and compatible numbers to make sure our answers make sense. Next week we will be diving in to Partial Quotients. This is different from the basic algorithm that many of us know, but it is a great process to make sure the students are understanding the process of division and that their number sense is solid. We will spending time on the NCTM Illuminations site (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) to explore in their "quotient cafe". www.nctm.org/Classroom-Resources/Illuminations/Interactives/The-Quotient-Cafe/ Students have always enjoyed this site. Students will at first be guided through choosing a dinosaur, penguin etc to enjoy bagels, waffles or donuts. They are taken through step-by-step how to use facts they know to help divide the food as evenly as possible. Once the process is understood, students will build their own problems and work with partners in the cafe! Be sure to ask them about this next week (they haven't seen it yet!) This is yet another resource, Ms. Pagnani shared with me last year and I LOVE it! (and so did the kids!). In Science, we worked hard all week preparing for our assessment on Matter. We reviewed our study guide and with the help of Mrs. Louchheim, gave students lots of different examples of the different processes we covered in this unit. We played a fun Jeopardy game to help us review as well. Overall, I was very pleased with the results of the assessment, which came home in your child's Friday folder yesterday. But, I know a few students didn't do as well as they had hoped and realized as we went through the test together, they didn't read all of the answers before making a choice, or just didn't answer completely. As mentioned in my email Friday, I am changing my typical Extra Math Help on Tuesday to be a little Extra SCIENCE. Any student that wants to re-take the assessment will be given an a new test on Tuesday (not the same test, but covering the same material). Grades will be averaged. This is not a requirement, but an option to any who felt they could have done better. I had a few tell me they knew they should have studied more, or that after reviewing all of the informationm again, they have a better understanding. They have all been working so hard and I don't want anyone to get down on themselves. This was a difficult and long test, but their effort and perseverance was awesome! Let me know if your child will be coming on Tuesday! In Social Studies, our flip books on our Native American tribes are really coming alive! Lots of great facts have been shared and now paragraphs are being written and books compiled. It has also been great to see and hear kids making connections to our novel The Sign of the Beaver. Next week is a short week and the beginning of a crazy time of year for everyone! Hopefully you found the red flyer on the 12 Days of Holiday Spirit in your child's folder. Cole School is full of spirit all of the time, butlet's really have some fun with this holiday challenge this year! Thank you to all of the parents who have already come in for conferences. It has been great to have so many students come along, I hope that you feel both you and your child gained some insight into what's going well and what we are going to be focused on until we meet again! It has been great to see kids take ownership of the areas they want to focus and together we will keep them accountable to these goals! Looking forward to meeting with the rest of you over the next two weeks! I will post a short newsletter next Tuesday evening in order to share some pictures from our book tasting and any pertinent news you need before Thanksgiving Break! Enjoy the weekend and as always, thank you for all of your support! ~ Maura IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER!
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June 2019
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