General News
Big thanks to the Gilmores for donating egg cartons to each Gamma to ease/organize rock collections. What a thoughtful surprise! We’ll be sending those home with next week’s Monday folder. We are still looking for help with transportation on Tuesday, February 13th to InnerSpace Caverns in Georgetown.. Fill out this form if you are able to come along!
Reading/Writing Update
This week we continued to work with memoir writing. Personal narratives are always a tricky one so please do take some time this weekend to look through photos, tell family stories, and reminisce together! We spent a lot of time with week oral storytelling in the classroom this week to get the juices flowing and this was helpful for many kiddos! We also filled out plot mountains as part of our drafting process to help us evaluate if a story has a climax, conflict, and theme to make a compelling narrative story. Gammas are doing a great job using similes, metaphors, and descriptive details to make the narratives pop!
Math Update
Division continues to be the name of the game in math class. Both groups practiced long division–Year 1 with whole whole numbers and single digit divisors and Year 2 turned remainders into decimals. All Gammas are exploring the concept of “compatible” numbers–meaning, using numbers from the same fact family to help ease estimation and make long division a wee less time-consuming. Both groups started “Friendfest”–kids invented a fictitious group of pals and then went to a restaurant to “order” food for the group. First, calculated their total (Year 1 with whole numbers and an option for decimals, Year 2 with decimals) and then used their new division skills to figure out how much each person would pay. Next week, we’ll continue division with an emphasis on making sense of remainders.
Theme Update
It was such a fun week in theme! The Gammas’ stamina for independent research has grown significantly and it was really cool to watch them start exploring with such confidence and enthusiasm. At the beginning of the week, we explored plate tectonics through an interactive web-based exploration. The next day, we “built” the different types of plate movements using graham crackers (continental crust), frosting (magma) and fruit roll-ups (oceanic crust) The Gammas were laser-focused! Mid-week we began learning about the Mariana Trench and each Gamma was tasked with picking a creature from this mysterious spot to research further. The kids used a shared template in Canva to create a mini-research infographic about their creature, including: Title, catchy tagline, photo with credits, photo caption, and research summary. The Gammas were ferocious researchers!
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