General News
What a wonderful first week in Gammaland! Your kiddos were bright, eager, and downright angelic this week! We got the hang of many structures and routines for the classroom and started to dip our toes into some of the great content we are going to explore this quarter. Remember to have your kiddo bring their completed P&P to school on Monday!
Our Gamma Agreements (complete with student-created catchy slogans) are:
- Water the Plants–Don’t Just Glance (take action to help, don’t just stand on the sidelines)
- Bend Like the Wind (be flexible)
- Keep Kind in Mind
- Be Great–Participate!
- Give Your Best–Don’t Let it Rest!
Remember to bookmark our Gamma webpage: Whippermathers.com. There you can find a class calendar with school events and birthdays, math tutorials a’ plenty and helpful parent links on the “Parent Hub” page!
ELA Update
This week we started reading our first class novel, The Witch of Blackbird Pond. We read the first three chapters together in class, answered our first round of reading response questions, and did vocabulary words together in class. Reading response questions will come home as P&P next week. We also explored some of the setting of the story by doing a “how to draw” video of a colonial merchant ship and a virtual field trip to a period accurate house, like the one Kit arrives at in chapter 3. We also got to use our ELA notebooks for the first time by writing a short response reflecting on the main character of our book, Kit. She is confident, generous, and brave! Throughout all of this we took our time to learn the structures and routines of the ELA room – aka sharing the couches! We had a cozy and productive week in the ELA room!
Math Update
We love to start the year with place value in Gamma to give kiddos a place to start that scaffolds nicely from last year’s learning. Year 1 students got an introduction to math class in general–what kind of activities to expect and an introduction to our math journals. We dove right into reading/writing large numbers to the billions. This group was wildly enthusiastic, with strong math skills, too! I can tell we are off to a great start. We ended the week with an electronic scavenger hunt–it was a huge hit. Year 2 kids started the year strong, as well. This group’s stamina grew so much over last year and it was nice to see that summer break didn’t disrupt that momentum–this group was also very eager and enthusiastic all week. We explored place value with decimals to the thousandths. Next week, both groups will head into rounding and estimation.
Theme Update
On Tuesday, we dove into theme by talking shop about the importance of our class agreements when it comes to group work–participation, communication, growth mindset and compromise. This can be tough at any age and we helped normalize the idea of conflict when collaborating creatively. Our theme unit is focused on the Revolutionary War and our system of government (in time for the election!) but we began the unit with a swift overview of the Age of Exploration to give students a little context before we begin researching the American Revolution. We did a partner station rotation to explore the main reasons that motivated early explorers (God, glory, gold, land and trade) and then ended the week with a small group collaboration to create “trading cards” of various early explorers. Next week, we’ll model researching a specific historical event as an in-class activity so students feel more comfortable and confident with their at-home theme P&P project (which will be coming home on Monday)
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