General News
- Part 3 of their science fair project is due on Monday, November 11th! The research this week looked great!
- Gammas will have a reduced homework load in both math and ELA next week to allow you all a little extra time to put science fair projects together for next week’s science fair!
ELA Update
Wowee! Gammas are on a roll with reading! Most people are halfway through their first book and a few folks have even moved on to trying out a second, or even third, genre! The enthusiasm for reading and creative writing remains off the charts in ELA Gammaland. On Monday we went over our P&P and talked about how, as readers, we should always be monitoring our thinking as we read. We are using emoji this week to help us keep track of our thinking while we read. We will also be practicing citing examples from the text by marking passages where we had a strong reaction to events in the book and telling about that part. We then spent the rest of the week talking about character traits. We started out by discussing the difference between character traits and feelings and brainstorming both positive and negative character traits. We then analyzed characters in our study books and thought about their positive and negative character traits. We wrote paragraphs and pulled examples from the text to back up our thinking. We acknowledged that most characters (much like in real life) don’t embody all positive or negative character traits, but can be a mix of both. We also talked about how thinking about a character’s traits as we read will help us with our fiction writing because a character’s traits usually change over time as part of the plot in fiction stories (also much like in real life). A great week with lots of reading and deep chats about our books!
Math Update
We had a lot of fun action in math this week! Year 1 kiddos played several fraction games using these awesome fraction strips that come with a Math Pentathlon game called Fab-a-Diffy! (We played that, too!) We competed (friendly!) in small groups for a whole-group Jeopardy game. The group was full of enthusiasm and still continues to demonstrate bravery when it comes to fractions. Year 2 kiddos began multiplication with fractions and learned to simplify before solving to make this process more efficient. We are aiming to move into a tough (but fun!) creative projects where the kids will be making cookbooks. In order to do so, we need to move to multiplication with mixed numbers very soon! (They can do it!) On Thursday, the Gammas got an extra-special treat in math: Ms. Amanda and Ms. Lorrie did a “teacher swap!” Ms. Amanda came downstairs to teach the Gammas about the concept of Pi. It was such fun to host a visiting teacher for the day.
Theme Update
What a fun week we had in theme! We started the week with an exploration of the organelles found inside both plant and animal cells. We used an interactive image to house a variety of different resources for research: web sites and videos, both! Kids then completed a graphic organizer of their research and then were sorted into “animal” and “plant” teams based on a “silly, snazzy, secret sorter!” We donned hats–animal and plant teams–and split the room in half. For the rest of the week, we crafted informational interactive posters exploring the organelles of a cell. We can’t wait for you to see their creations at POP.
 |  |  |
|---|---|---|
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |
