Dear Families,
Here's a peek at what's been going on in our classroom recently.
For our Humanities program, the focus during the months of November and December has been on the Americas. In our classroom, we've taken this as an opportunity to travel across the globe during Morning Meeting. We've learned to greet each other in different languages, explored our own cultural heritages, and heard stories from cultures throughout the Americas. This exploration will move to different parts of the world as we continue through the year.
In Financial Management, we've completed two successful bartering sessions--one for surplus items, and another for handmade goods. To wrap up this learning, our class has been invited to join the 5th-8th graders in one last bartering bazaar this coming Friday, 12/8! For this last barter, all trades are welcome. Students can bring surplus items for trade (no more than what can fit in an Ingles bag), handmade goods, homemade foods, or coupons for services. I'll be sending an email this week with more details about this last bartering event.
In Weasel Math, we're building on our skills in addition and subtraction by working with even larger numbers--up to ten thousand. When working with these large numbers, we've been focused on interpreting and solving single- and multi-step word problems. We've also been continuing to work on multiplication tables through whole group games and partner activities. I'm encouraging students to practice with flashcards at home to help with memorization of the times tables.
Our "Blue Group" in math has been working toward mastery of long division and multi-digit multiplication, also with a focus on interpreting single- and multi-step word problems.
In Weasel ELA, we celebrated our first publishing party the day before Thanksgiving break. This party was complete with refreshments and brand new pencils/erasers for all! Students got the chance to read their published stories and take questions from the audience. There were even several requests to have a special place in our class library to house our published books so kids can revisit the stories their classmates have published.
The publishing party marked the end of our narrative writing unit, which means that this past week we've moved on to our unit on information writing. For this unit, students have already chosen their own topic to write about, and they are now beginning the difficult but essential work of outlining and structuring a text before starting to write.
Our Reader's Workshop is currently also focused on nonfiction, which complements the work we're doing in Writer's Workshop nicely. In this unit, the focus so far has been on understanding how nonfiction texts are structured, how to glean the main idea and important details from a text, and how to clearly convey what a text is about by teaching others.
Looking forward, as a class we're discussing some ways to celebrate the holiday season together. This week we'll talk more about having a small gift exchange with just our class on the last Friday before the break. More details about this to come!
Thank you for your support,
Lauren