General News
We had a wonderful first week back from break! The Gamma class was hardworking, thoughtful, kind, and enthusiastic – as always!
ELA Update
This week we began by introducing our new novel study. We are reading Freewater by Amina Luqman-Dawson. This story is set pre-civil war, during the Antebellum era. It is a story of friendship and community. We started the week off by exploring the setting of the novel by taking a look at the Great Dismal Swamp. This massive, forested wetland once covered millions of acres in Southwest Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina. We read an article together from the Smithsonian Institution about the habitat of this amazing place and how it provided refuge for hundreds of escaped slaves during this time period as they subsisted off the land.This book moves fast, with frequent jumps between character perspectives! Next week we’ll talk more about the many different characters to help slow down the story and understand each character a little more. This week we also began the process of typing our fiction stories and getting them ready for publication. We had a mini-lesson on how to appropriately format dialogue with quotation marks, commas, and line breaks to help the reader follow along with the story more easily. Gammas that were less familiar with typing and document creation learned a lot this week about formatting with page breaks, centering and aligning text, and font selection.
Math Update
Both groups were dropped right into the notorious “pit of doom” as we launched into our long division unit. (If you haven’t seen the video that spurred this metaphor, you can find it on Whippermathers! Beware–it is catchier than it should be!) Year 1 students bravely faced all the pesky steps of long division. We started by physically dividing Gamma bucks to model division sentences so that kids could see how/why the standard algorithm “works” even though it doesn’t make as much number sense as non-traditional methods. We did some “Division Karate” to make the process a wee more multi-sensory! The group did an amazing job demonstrating patience and resilience as we learned the “dance.” Year 2 students started the week with a 6th grade skill that also allowed us to refresh our division skills: converting fractions to decimals. We played a very exciting game called “Frac-Tac-Toe” where the students band together to take on the teacher. I’m sad to report that I lost three times in a row! At week’s end we began practicing double-digit division–a much more time-intensive endeavor. If your child is having trouble with the standard algorithm for division, remember you can always visit Whippermathers for tutorials!
Theme Update
We launched our new unit on slavery and the Civil War this week. We opened things up on Monday by reflecting on what we already knew about periods of history before this one – many units covered in Gamma and Beta prepared us for this. Ancient African, Indigenous societies of the Americas, Revolutionary War, Western Expansion, and Colonial times were all helpful background knowledge that we reviewed. This week we focused on the concepts of colonization, labor, the slave economy, and how race and racism contributed to this period in history. On Monday we looked at maps of colonial expansion 1550 – 1938 and discussed what colonization means. On Tuesday we reviewed the triangular trade route and the labor economy of the southern colonies, as well as several of the northern colonies. Many Gammas posed the question, “Why did slavery happen?” Through the exploration of the maps we found the answer to be: because it was profitable for the economy. On Wednesday we explored the different types of labor performed by enslaved people on plantations. We focused on three main categories: domestic, agricultural, and skilled crafts/trades. Gammas watched historical reenactment videos and explored the website for George Washington’s Mount Vernon to learn more about what daily life and labor looked like for enslaved people. You can check out the resources they used on the Whippermathers page! We finished the week by making identity collages about the things that make us, us; things like animals, foods, books, places, friends, family, hobbies. We then talked about the concept of race and created a definition together of what we think race and racism means. We learned that genetic studies show that while skin, hair, and eye color may vary there are no distinct races, biologically speaking. After this discussion we shared the collages we made together as a class and noticed how little race had to do with the things we chose to include in them.
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