Good Morning,
Thank you
for sending such motivated thinkers each and every day! Based on the
feedback from the kids, it sounds like each of you had a wonderful
vacation filled with fun family celebrations.
As we kick off 2014 in our classroom, I thought I would give you a quick update on our academic focuses.
One
important item is that we will have a Colonial America guest speaker,
Miss Veronica, coming in on Monday, January 13th. Informational letters
(printed on yellow papers and placed in Thursday folders) were sent home
before break, but I thought I would send a quick reminder. The guest
speaker will come to Gold Rush and provide an interactive presentation,
Children's Lives in Colonial America.
It is a wonderful and authentic view into what it meant to be a child
in the early days of our nation. Students will have a chance to comb
wool, spin yarn, make a leather button, practice doing sums and spelling
on a slate, use a quill pen, and play with authentic colonial toys.
Please send a check made out to GRE for $4.50 by Thursday, January 9th.
In
math we
will dive deeper into our unit on fractions. Before break we worked on
hands on conceptual understanding of fractions and built models that
showed equivalent fractions, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and
division of fractions and introduced how number sentences can be used to
communicate the conceptual building. We will now extend our
explorations to different settings and learn more strategies to convert,
compare, add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions. To begin we
will identify the connections between fractions, percents, and decimals.
This is one of my favorite units to teach because student break through
the, "I can't do fractions" mentality. We are using words like,
"fractions and I are having a disagreement about...." This allows me to
help students identify the specific element that is tripping them up. It
may be common denominators, it may be their multiplication
combinations, or simply adding denominators when they should be adding
numerators. As you can predict, this unit will take the majority of
January!
In
writing, we will begin working on
creating an information piece of writing that connects with our Colonial
America unit. Before break, students began publishing a feature article
focused on an area of specialty. During flex time this week and next,
students will finish publishing and formatting these pieces
electronically. We will use these experiences in our Colonial America
writing and identify key events, people, and ideas from the time period.
In
reading,
we are working on the skill of determining importance. To begin this
process students worked on developing analogies about what it means to
determine importance in reading. Most students have strong abilities in
fiction to determine key events, people, and ideas, but when we transfer
our thinking to nonfiction, students try to memorize every fact and
detail they read without determining which facts, ideas, and people are
essential and which are non essential. With this skill we will be
analyzing many different non fiction texts connected to our study of
Colonial America.
Our
Earth Science unit
will begin today. The overall goal of the unit will be for students to
know and understand the processes and interactions of Earth's systems
and the structure and dynamics of Earth and other objects in space.
To
do this in class we will be looking at the heating of the Earth and how
that will impact different structures in the Earth. In technology
students will look at how natural disasters like earthquakes are caused
by processes and interactions of Earth's systems. In library students
will look at how the Earth and the Sun provide a diversity of renewable
and nonrenewable resources. With the integration of library and
technology classes, students will have many opportunities to deepen
their understanding of Earth Science.
Thank you for sharing your child with me each day!
Megan
