Thursday, January 11, 2018

Good afternoon!

Here is a catch up of what's been going on in room 18 since Monday!

Math: Students have been continuing to use "play" and manipulatives to ease into division. We continued to work with counters and prompts to understand how we can use divisors to split dividends into groups to find the quotient of an equation. We have worked with numbers that divide nicely into even groups as well as numbers that leave us with a remainder. Next week, we will be working with long division strategies, but will begin by working with "new" strategies before we work with the "traditional" long division. I am hoping that this order will encourage students to give each strategy an honest effort before settling on a strategy that they feel best works for them, not just defaulting to the traditional method. This week has hopefully helped to reduce much of the anxiety surrounding division!

Science/LA: We have been using our science and LA time to work on our time capsule contribution. Students have continued to research an extreme weather event from 2017 to collect information to include in the article they will write and add to their google drive blog. Students began writing their articles this afternoon after having sufficient research time to find details to add to their articles. We also began a checklist of the items that should be included in their article, instead of a rubric, to ensure that students are meeting expected criteria.

Social/Science: Students had their last work period on their stop motion video today. There are still groups of students who did not use their time effectively to complete the work and were given ample support and time. We will be watching the videos tomorrow and comparing them to the rubric we developed to see how well students met expectations. It is my hope that students will be able to have some revision time next week to "bump up" their work so that it will be their best work that they present to parents during our student led conferences.

THANK YOU TO THE STUDENTS AND FAMILIES WHO HAVE ALREADY DONATED SOCKS TO OUR CLASSROOM COLLECTION! As we now have a class set of student whiteboards we have started to use them frequently during math. While we have a class set of whiteboards, we do not have a class set of erasers and that's where old mismatched or "hole-y" socks make excellent erasers for whiteboard work. So, again, thank you for supporting the work we do by sending in old, clean socks!

Reminders:
-Student led conferences on January 25
-PD Day January 26 - NO SCHOOL FOR STUDENTS