Dear families,
The unexpectedly warm weather this week filled our classroom with the energy and excitement of spring, and it's been fun to share together all the signs of spring we’ve been noticing—the return of birdsong in the mornings, the blooming of daffodils and crocuses, the sound of frogs as the sun is going down. With the warm spring weather, students are also starting to think ahead to next year—to new teachers and friendships and learning opportunities—and this fit perfectly with the week's themes in Centering and Extensions.
This week, our class spent time thinking about the concept of responsibility during Centering. The students blew me away with their insights into this complicated concept! Responsibility, they said, is when someone else puts their trust in you and relies on you when they need help with something. This applied to our Conflict Resolution Extension, where we talked about responsible decision-making at school; it applied to our Financial Management Extension, where we discussed taking on new responsibilities at home; and it even applied to our Humanities Extension, where where our conversation about the major historical events of WWII included a discussion of the concept of a “bystander” and the responsibility we have to one another as human beings. We’ll continue to build on these conversations and activities next week during Extensions.
In Math, students are starting to feel comfortable with the process of long division, and many have made the leap from dividing two-digit numbers to dividing three- and four-digit numbers with ease. We will continue to work on this skill next week, so please keep practicing multiplication tables at home with your child. Soon we’ll be adding additional multiplication tables to our repertoire—6’s, 7’s, 8’s, and 9’s! The Blue Group has grown very confident with English and metric measurements of weight and distance, and next week we will be moving on to English and metric measurements of volume.
In Reader’s Workshop, we’ve fully immersed ourselves in the world of historical fiction. We’ve discussed how to hold multiple timelines in our heads when we read complex texts, and we’ve also started posing new questions of our books like, ‘what is this story really about?’ and, ‘why is this story significant?’ Our whole-class read-aloud text, Number the Stars (set during WWII), has also been a perfect fit with our study of European cultures in our Humanities class.
In Writer's Workshop, we are on the cusp of publishing our information books! Students have been working hard to create their final drafts, and they are very proud of the work they’ve done. Our plan (fingers crossed!) is to have our publishing party sometime this coming week.
Our Valentine's Day celebration