General News
Sadly, the weather wasn’t on our side this week for Shipe Park day but we had a lovely friendship day anyway! There were crafts, Valentine cards, and treats! Remember there is no school this coming Monday for Presidents Day/Family Field Day!
ELA Update
This week in Gammaland ELA we had our usual Monday discussion about last week’s reading. We are quickly approaching the climax of the book! On Tuesday and Thursday we spent a little more time on figurative language and looked at more quotes from the text to really solidify our knowledge of what different literary devices can do for the reader. Come by the Gamma room and check out our gallery wall of amazing illustrations from the story! We also talked this week about how to write a great summary of events from the story. Summarizing a particular event is much like writing a mini plot mountain and we used the acronym SWBST (somebody wanted, but, so, then) to help us with our writing. We reread the chapter where the kids retrieve a pig for the community and wrote summaries about this event together. We then brainstormed a list of events that have been happening in the community of Freewater: Daria and Ibra’s wedding, fire in the cornfield, Ferdinand’s knife is missing, the kids bringing back a pig, the Sky Bridge being moved, and the tree cutters are approaching. We began drafting and summarizing these events in the style of newspaper articles! We’ll continue drafting and publishing these next week for our own Freewater community newspaper!
Math Update
Math was much fun this week as we are entering in two new units that are both more “hands-on” than our previous skill of long division. Year 1 students learned how to wield a protractor and discovered the magic of triangles: classification based on side lengths and angles. We played some angle-related “Simon Says” and then crafted our very out “Pet Polygons”–triangles with creative faces and back-stories. (We were also sure to measure each angle and classify our pet based on what we learned in class.) Year 2 students bravely tackled a tough-ish skill: beginning to graph basic multiplicative and additive patterns from input/output tables. The kids picked this strange skill up quite swiftly so we ended up graphing two-step equations by week’s end. It was a strong week in math class and we are super proud of this week’s accomplishments!
Theme Update
We went back in time a little bit this week to pre-civil war to discuss quilt codes used on the Underground Railroad. Enslaved people used specific quilt patterns as secret messages to communicate information about escape routes and safe houses along the Underground Railroad. We read two Jacqueline Woodson picture books, This is the Rope and Show Way to introduce this lesson. These books were a poetic way to talk about the importance of family history and the oral storytelling traditions that kept the quilt codes alive for many generations, even when they weren’t needed anymore. This was also a great connection to our field trip last week as genealogy and lost family history came up several times! On Tuesday we read more about what the different quilt patterns meant, looked at some well-known quilt patterns, and made templates to craft our own quilt squares! Hello, geometry and math integration! On Wednesday we began to look at the world post-civil war by learning about the culture of the south immediately after the war. We discussed the Lost Cause Myth and looked at monuments erected in the south to consider what messages they communicated. Next week we will use this information to learn more about the Reconstruction era post-war and create our own monuments that honor abolitionist events.
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