General News
The final part of their Theme project is due this Monday, March 3rd. We will start presenting our speeches and visual art creations.
Get ready for a Gamma Soul Food Potluck on Wednesday, March 5th. Details can be found on this flier and we’ll offer this sign-up sheet so others can get a feel for your offering. We’d love to have your participation, but know that bringing a dish is optional. If you can bring one, great! (Don’t forget an ingredient card!)
Don’t forget about these awesome events coming up at the Haskell house! Check out this document to learn more about speakers that will be at the Haskell house on March 9th and April 12th
ELA Update
On Monday we went through our final round of reading response questions with different colored pens to make sure we’re answering every part of a question about these final chapters of the book, to ensure deep understanding and that we will go out on a high note with the novel. This book has been informative, inspiring, and a wonderful companion to our social studies unit! We then had our discussion about last week’s reading in small groups. During the middle part of our week we practiced our summarizing, publishing, and, especially, our editing skills by finishing up our newspaper articles! They look fantastic with engaging photos, catchy headlines and subheadings, and comprehensive information about the events of Freewater! On Thursday we used our ELA time to make a little more progress on our speeches and get them finished by the end of the week. A 3-day writing project was a big challenge for 4th and 5th graders, in terms of pacing, and they rose to the challenge!
Math Update
Math has been filled with opportunities to incorporate artistic projects (thank you, geometry!) Year 2 kids were supposed to continue with graphing linear equations, but they showed mastery so fast we decided to move along to our next skill: finding area and perimeter of polygons. While we learned this last year, we stuck to rectangles only so now it is time to branch into more involved shapes (ie, parallelograms, triangles, etc!) We did a hands-on craft activity turning rectangles into parallelograms (without right angles) so that kids could see why the formula for finding the area of a parallelogram is the same as the formula we use for rectangles. Year 1 kids continued working with shapes and we played a collaborative game of Jeopardy to review everything we’ve learned to date about shapes. Both groups tackled their Quarter 3 check-ins so that next week’s learning can be light and project-based. During station rotations, all kids had a chance to use acrylic paint and construction paper to “see” how symmetry works. We also used this time to create “quadrilateral maps” using colored toothpicks and craft glue! It was a great week!
Theme Update
On Monday we started our week off with an awesome lesson on writing strong leads to hook the reader. This is important when writing anything, but especially when writing a speech! We played a fun guessing game where we wrote leads on random topics and also had AI write the same leads and tried to guess which ones were the Gamma student lead and which was the AI generated one. On Tuesday we jumped in with speech writing! We’re shooting for 2 – 4 minute long speeches, which roughly equals about 300 words. We learned how to use the word count in documents to keep track of their progress. We structured our speeches: hook, introduction, biography background information, and connecting their early life to why they became an abolitionist. We followed this with 3 major events in the person’s life connected to their abolition work. On Thursday we were able to practice our editing skills by partnering with a classmate to practice reading our speeches – when you read it outloud you notice much more quickly spelling and/or punctuation errors! We topped it off by printing out their writing and gluing it down onto notecards so when they deliver their speeches they can project their voices without having it hidden behind a piece of paper.
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