General News
Your P&P folders come home on Mondays and are due back the following Monday. The students participated in a mini-lesson over how to fill out their supplemental logs. This is a great task to hand over to Gammas! They are developmentally ready to learn how to self-organize and it is such great practice for the middle school transition. Remember–if your child needs a math boost you can visit Whippermathers.com to get short tutorial videos (and see our math scope/sequence!)
Reading/Writing Update
This week we started the writing workshop by learning about kernel sentences. Kernel sentences are short sentences that are technically complete, but don’t contain enough details to be considered robust. We used the analogy of how you can technically eat a kernel of popcorn but if you heat the kernel and add flavorings and butter it will be much more delicious! We practiced all week using who, what, when, where, and why questions to make our sentences more robust. In reading we started practicing our fluency using readers theater scripts and even got the chance to write our own! We will be reading and writing more scripts (and hopefully putting together a performance in the future)!
Math Update
We started the year off reviewing place value in both math classes. Year 1 students practice reading large numbers to the billions, while Year 2 students focused more on decimal place value to the thousandths. We took a little tour of the Whippermathers website so students could see where to go for help. You will also find a hot pink ‘math helper’ chart in your P&P folder that you are welcome to keep at home as a reference. We looked over the P&P together and Gammas learned about a challenge option that is described on the front page of the packet, should you want to review. (If your child is flying through math practice, I encourage nudging them towards the challenge option!) With a little help from our Year 2 Gammas, we taught Year 1 students how to explore the wonderful world of grid logic puzzles to help promote higher level thinking skills (Plus, they are so much fun to solve!) Extra effort in the form of grid logic or challenge options will pay Gamma bucks.
Theme Update
This week we started our chemistry unit! We learned about the foundations of chemistry: atoms, molecules, and elements. We watched a hilarious Bill Nye video about atoms and molecules and practiced our notetaking skills (they did great with this! Great auditory comprehension in this group!). We made models of atoms, molecules, and played a bingo-like game to learn how to read the Periodic Table of Elements. We finished out the week with a mini-lab using balloons, salt and pepper, and static electricity to learn about positive and negative charges in atoms!
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