We are two days away from closing out the first half of the school year! It has been a rollercoaster adventure for sure. I am so excited to see what the remainder of the year has in store for us. This week we took a break from our curriculum things, and have focused heavily on our religion unit, some fun poetry activities and a little math.
On Thursday, tomorrow, we will have our Christmas Party from 1:30-2:30. If you would like to come to the party, please feel free to come! Tomorrow, we will do a lot of Christmas games, and activities to take a break from all of the other things that we've covered this week. On Friday, we will dismiss from school at 11:30. Friday is a day that is strictly for rehearsal for the Christmas Eve service. If you do not plan to have your child sing, it is from my understanding they do not need to attend school. I would recommend not bringing a book bag on Friday, as they will not have anything to turn in. If you have not already sent back Tuesday folders, please send those back by Friday. We will begin to record our religion interviews tomorrow. The goal is to have them all done, and ready for uploading on Friday. If we do not get through the interviews, then we will do them when we return in January. I am looking forward to the interviews based on the class discussions that we had. Important Information:
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A much better week, behavior wise. We are still struggling with talking out of turn, and after being asked to switch to ninja mode. By now most of you have noticed that they are bringing their books home. I am switching to them taking books home, not only because it helps them to see what we did in class, but to prepare them for the upper grades. In 4th grade all books go home so, I figured it would be great to prepare them for it.
Math: In this new unit, we are learning how to use the multiplication table, how to apply the properties that we learned, and how to explain what we're doing and why. The explaining part is a struggle, because they for one hate it, but they also struggle with using their math vocabulary. However, I am pushing them towards being able to put their verbal explanations onto paper. we were very successful with it today, so hopefully we continue to make the great progress. I like this unit because it has them working with the multiplication table, in which I introduced to them back in unit 1. I am thrilled when they tell me "This is going to be so easy," because I know then that they are confident in their abilities, and the assignment is going to be something they enjoy. Reading: This week we are learning about and reading folktales. We briefly talked about them back in October, so I was happy to hear them bring up that discussion. I was pleased when they made the connection to the social studies unit that we covered on traditions. The folktales that we've read have had lessons that I think are very important: the first being that even if you are small, you can do important things and the second being that sometimes what they are looking for is right in front of them. We started presentations this week, and so far so good. I am looking forward to seeing the rest of them. I forgot to record the first two presentations, so I will see if the students would like to do it again so I can upload it on class dojo. Other notes:
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A rather rough week behavior wise. We struggled tremendously with following directions, staying focus, and talking when they were not supposed to. Monday we struggled still, but Tuesday and today were better days. We've had a number of talks, so it seems that the conversations are working. Hopefully we continue to improve. Outside of the that, we had a great week!
Math: We finished up our division unit, but we are not done with multiplication and division yet. I am confident that the students see the relationship between division and multiplication. However, I honestly still expect them to make mistakes. This is something completely new to them, so I do not expect them to have it mastered. Multiplication is our strongest area. They are doing really well at cranking out the products to the equations. Division is not our strongest area, but they are still cranking them out. What surprised me the most is that some of them prefer division over multiplication! I did not see that coming at all. We will probably continue to work on multiplication and division till the end of December and do a review when we come back in January. Reading: We moved into one of my favorite things, poetry! I love poetry, and I have a few that love it as well. We are focusing heavily on free verse and limerick poetry. Most of the poems that we've read have been either free verse and limerick. When we return from Christmas break I would like to do a poetry unit so they can experience all forms of poetry. We are also learning about alliteration, rhyme, similes and metaphors. We learned about them individually, how they are connected, and why they are used in poetry. All groups are done with projects, so we are preparing for presentations. We will more than likely do them next week. I am so excited to see them, as I've seen them through the construction phase. Since they are in group of four, I am not sure how the final products will go home. However, I will let the students decide. I will make sure to record the presentation and upload the videos to our Class Dojo site :) Science: We are getting ready to end our new chapter. We have one more lesson to cover before it ends. This upcoming lesson will be on life cycles. I am currently thinking of an activity that we can do so they can experience the life cycle of something. However, the only things I could think of is a butterfly, but that was done in 2nd grade. I will keep looking but I am open to some ideas if you have some! Religion: In our new unit we have a big question that needs and answer; "Who is God?" That is the big umbrella for us, but there are four smaller questions underneath it. In order for us to answer that big question, we first must answer the following questions; "Who has God called to do his will? How have different people responded to God's calling? How do I respond to God's calling? How do I fit into God's plan of salvation?" The end result will be a number of videos that the students record that will for sure go on our class website, but they may or may not go on the schools website. I will tell you more as we get closer to filming days. We will began to memorize more and the number of days we have to do so will be shorten because the Christmas Eve service is close. Important Information:
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