Dear families,
I hope everyone enjoyed the unexpectedly long weekend! These last two weeks have been especially eventful with our Mid-year Meets. I really enjoyed these meetings as they gave me the chance to connect with each of you and talk about all the learning and growth I've seen from your children this year.
In Centering and Extensions this week, our class spent some time trying to see ourselves as part of a larger picture. We've been working on orienting ourselves using the cardinal directions (NSEW), and in centering we talked about how in many cultures these directions take on greater symbolic meaning through their association with colors and with the yearly seasons. This was a great way to wrap up our Humanities study of the Americas, and it led into a class project in which we split into groups that created hanging "lanterns" for our classroom, each representing one of the four cardinal directions (see photos below!)
In Math, we've started to work on multiplying single-digit numbers by two- and three-digit numbers. We'll keep practicing this skill in the coming week before beginning our study of long division. Again, any multiplication practice you can do at home will help tremendously! The Blue Group has hit the road running with our study of metric lengths, adding, subtracting, and converting between centimeters, meters, and kilometers. We'll continue our metric study next week as we move on to weight. This pairs nicely with the subjects that Ms. Chris is covering in Science, which will give the kids even more hands-on experience with estimation and measurement.
In ELA, we finished our non-fiction unit of Reader's Workshop! Students got the chance to show off what they've learned using different "lenses" when they read different kinds of non-fiction, and it was exciting to see how far they've come. Another round of one-on-one reading assessment with me this week has shown me that they're also making leaps and bounds in their ability to read complex texts. I'll be continuing these assessments with the our class next week before we embark on our next unit: Historical Fiction. In Writer's Workshop, we've begun working on revising and editing our information books, and we'll continue to work on this next week with greater attention to spelling, paragraphing, and punctuation.