From Kristen Garland:
The terrific third graders continue to have fun learning and growing as students and human beings.
For Social/Emotional Learning, we have a game portion in our Morning Meetings. Children participate in a “Group Activity—The whole class does a short, inclusive activity together, reinforcing learning and building class cohesion through active participation.”- Responsive Classroom. They develop game-playing skills such as taking turns, being a good sport, and playing a game for fun. During Language Arts, the children continued with our class book, My Father’s Dragon. They pre-learn essential vocabulary and read the story together. We will work on comprehension and the different story elements. For word work, the students reviewed different affixes and how they change the root work. For writing, we finished up our Informative Writing about the Historical Society and started an assessment on Informative Writing to wrap up our unit. We kicked off our study of birds with two visits from the Harris Center. We learned what birds in this area eat during the winter and used our playground to find possible food, shelter, and water for birds. The children enjoyed learning to use field guides to identify birds and started collecting data on birds that may visit our bird feeder. We are excited to start observing our feathered friends visiting our birdfeeder outside our window!
4th/5th Grade Language Arts -
The students continue reading their literature books, working on vocabulary, fluency, decoding, comprehension, and retelling. For our extensive Informative Writing Unit, they are finishing up their writing on their unique places to visit in Seoul, South Korea, with the MysteryWriting team. Please enjoy this project with your child when it is sent home. We have started our end-of-the-unit assessment on Informative Writing. They also work on the morphology of words, discovering how adding different affixes changes the meaning of the words. Please remember to have your child read daily during the holidays. Their Reading homework is due on Monday, January 6th, when we return to school!
From Deb Quinn:
December has been flying by!
In math, 3rd, 4th and 5th graders have been wrapping up units and working on memorizing math facts.
4th and 5th graders have continued to care for our turtles. They have grown a lot and the students have taken the responsibility seriously. We have done research about the painted turtles and created art work to illustrate thier research.
In Social Studies, we have been learning about Christmas cultures from around the world. It has been fun to compare and contrast the traditions. We have been able to compare our studies to the lessons we took part of at the Mariposa.
