It's a short week: Thanksgiving break. School gets out at noon on Wednesday. Here's the short plan:

Writing: Continue Opinion Writing. We'll finish gathering evidence to support our opinions. The sources for evidence are our personal experiences, outside research, and other people's personal experiences.

Reading & Social Studies: Begin "A History of US: The First Americans" by Joy Hakim. We'll practice stopping, thinking, and reacting to informational text.

Math: Finish Division. We'll model how to draw a diagram for a division problem. We'll also go over the standard long division algorithm.

Feel free to check the Curriculum Guide for more detailed information on what we'll be working on in class this week and beyond. Cheers!

Writing: Continue Opinion Essays. Students will crystalize their thesis statement and the reasons that support it. They'll also collect mini-stories, research, and interviews to use as evidence in their essays.

Reading: Continue Connection Making. We'll learn how to make meaningful connections to the text we read by relating the characters to ourselves, identifying distracting connections and fixing up meaning, and connecting big ideas and themes across texts.

To integrate Social Studies, we'll be reading informational text about the Native Americans from Joy Hakim's A History of US.

Math: Continue Division. We'll work on estimating a quotient. We'll learn how to figure out what to do with a remainder. We'll explore the standard long division algorithm and compare it to the partial quotients way. And we'll also learn how to solve division problems by drawing a diagram.

Feel free to check the Curriculum Guide for more detailed information on what we'll be working on in class this week. Cheers!

Highlights of Last Week:

We finished our personal narratives in writing. On Friday we celebrated publishing our stories to the website. With performance lights on, students who wanted to got to read their personal narratives to the class as their story was projected behind them. Thanks for sharing Stefan, Maya, Chase, Pete, Izzy, Olivia, Fitzy, Anna, Aidan, and Jenna! 

We changed pods. Students still need to agree on a group name.

In math we learned how to solve a division problem using the partial quotients method. Unlike the standard long division way, the partial quotients way is flexible, forgiving, and intuitive. Parents may be confused by it, but check out this YouTube video which will show you how to do it.

Here's This Week's Plan:

Writing: Continue Opinion Writing. We'll focus on how to push our thinking more deeply and how to generate a thesis for an argument essay.

Reading: Connection Making. We'll learn how to make meaningful connections to the text we read. To connect to Social Studies, we'll be reading informational text about the Native Americans from Joy Hakim's A History of US.

Math: Continue Division. We'll explore division even more, learning how to model it with base-ten blocks. We'll learn how to divide by 2-digit divisors using partial quotients way first, then the standard long division way.

Here are some math videos to help you with division:
Partial Quotients (YouTube)
Division using Partial Quotients (Khan Academy) 
How to do Long Division (Math Playground) 
Long Division Basics (Khan Academy)

Grammar: We're going to learn when to use paragraphs.