General News
Operation Ms. Lorrie’s Birthday Surprise was a huge success! There were cookies, cupcakes, cards, and more! We worked in secret on an interactive writing exercise throughout the past two weeks during ELA class and presented her with a “spooky” and hilarious story about sardines (complete with illustrations) during her “unbirthday” ceremony, as well as a framed poster that she loved. You can read the story here!
ELA Update
For a short week we sure packed a lot in! In addition to working on our interactive writing piece for Ms. Lorrie this week, we also worked on our class novel study, wrote personal narratives, and began writing persuasive essays. Interactive writing is a fun process where the teacher and students work together to create a piece.. It’s a collaborative process that involves the teacher dictating and students contributing words and ideas. It requires patience, flexibility, open mindedness, and creativity! The Gammas wrote an incredible story together! On Tuesday we reviewed the study guide for The Witch of Blackbird Pond and discussed key plot points and character developments so far. On Wednesday and Thursday we read two articles about the benefits of spending time in nature. We crafted personal narratives about a time we found ourselves in a peaceful nature spot – like Kit finds herself in the meadow in the book. We then used a graphic organizer to start the process of creating a persuasive writing essay about the benefits of time in nature.
Math Update
We covered LOTS of ground for a short week in both classes! Year 1 students learned the tale of Ms. Salome’s Great Aunt Mary (AKA Scary Mary!) and how this relates to the trickier operations of subtraction and division. We applied the lessons of Scary Mary to practice subtraction with regrouping, especially across zeros–which can be a tricky skill! So picky! So many details! The kids did great. We ended the week with a fun game of ‘Subtraction Basketball’ where we took kid-made subtraction problems (to the hundred millions) and estimated them before solving. Once solved, we used addition to ‘check’ our answers. A correct answer resulted in the kids wadding up the problem and chunking it towards a makeshift basketball hoop where Ms. Lorrie paid Gamma bucks to the community bank for each slam dunk. So fun! Year 2 dove into a tough new skill: order of operations! We learned to solve systematically using “carrots” and “rewriting” to be sure we were solving in a way that will make their future Alegbra experiences much easier. Kids usually love this skill and this group was no different. Seeing their stamina for more middle-school-minded math was really cool to witness.
Theme Update
In theme, we did a crash course about the Revolutionary War. We are preparing kiddos for this unit on our current government system and voting process and exploring a bit about how our country/government came to be will provide great context/background to understand the election process. We talked about the benefits (and challenges!) of small group practice and why/how we will vary the modalities of learning during theme so kids get a chance to practice collaboration at times and at other times will have the chance to work independently. (Both are great skills to hone!) This week, we worked with set partners for the entire short week so kids could have time to learn their partner’s working style and make a plan for accomplishing a project. We explored resources detailing the main events leading up to the revolution–taxation without representation, Stamp Act, Boston Tea Party, etc.–through a variety of formats (articles, websites and videos) Kids took notes throughout the week and then received a “Revolutionary War” sorting card which gave them a side to rally in support of as they created persuasive opinion newspaper articles as partnered teams. This project mirrored much of the writing activities happening in ELA (lovely!) Next week, students will have time to present their findings with the class.
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