Weekly Update (11/11)

Hello Families,
Happy Veterans Day! Thank you to all those who have served and are currently serving in our military. On Wednesday Barrows had a wonderful All School Assembly honoring veterans in our community. A big thank you to Ms. Becker for putting it all together.

Although our time together was short this week, we had a busy week of activities and learning (see below). The next two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving will likely be a mix of crazy and busy, but hopefully also fun and productive! Parent teacher conferences are next week (Wed, Thurs, Fri). Thank you for signing up! I look forward to meeting with you all!

A notice went home this week about the Barrows Turkey Trot.  On the back of the notice are feathers to fill out about gratefulness.  Please donate $1.00 for each feather you complete.  This money will go to the Reading Food Pantry.  You can submit as many feathers as you want until November 22nd.  A feather will be pulled as the grand prize winner as the Grand Marshall to lead the Turkey Trot.  A runner up will get to dress as the shining star and be the caboose. Parents are invited to come watch the Trot!

Barrows Weekly Newsletter
Here is the link to the latest Starburst from Principal Gallegos.

​Important Upcoming Dates:

• Wednesday 11/16: Early release at 12:45pm for Parent Teacher Conferences.
• Friday 11/18: No school. Full day Parent Teacher Conferences.
• Wednesday 11/23: Turkey Trot. Early release at 11:00am for Thanksgiving Break. No school again until 11/28.

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Above, Barrows assembly honoring our community veterans, including Grant's grandfather, Army Sergeant Michael Choate. Also students modeling 2-digit numbers during a math game, and students drawing/writing their engineering plans for our Erosion activity in Science.
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Below are some highlights from the week.

Community Building
Morning Meetings continue to help build our community. We played 4 Corners and Coseeki this week. Students also keep learning more about each other through our Share time. Ask your child if they can name everyone in class. There are still some students who don't know everyone's name.
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Literacy 
We finished reading There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom by Louis Sachar this week. Students loved the book and hopefully learned about how a character can change throughout a story. Ask your child to tell you about the ending!

We read a new decodable story called The Lost Colt, which featured our new phonics patterns (closed syllable exceptions) in action. Students drew pictures of important scenes in the story and read the story out loud to a partner to practice fluency. We'll be doing more work with it next week!

Writing
Some students shared their personal narratives with the class. We will continue sharing next week. I love hearing their work! I will be sending them home next week for your reading pleasure.

Next week we will apply our narrative skills to write a story about what happened to the lost colt in our decodable story. We'll also continue our sentence level work in recognizing a complete sentence versus a fragment.

Phonics
Students took their Unit 3 Phonics test on Thursday. Many were very confident! This short unit focused on "closed syllable exceptions," which are English rule breakers. Words like, "wild," and "post," where the vowel makes an unexpected long sound, are examples of these spelling patterns. I will grade tests over the weekend and hopefully have them ready to send home next week with students' personal narratives.

Our next unit focuses on suffixes. You can learn all about it through the Fundations Home Support Packet for Unit 4! 

Math
This week in Math we needed to take a step back to reinforce missing skills. With the new math curriculum, I found out that students were missing some important skills in modeling 2 digit numbers (many students were intimidated by 2-digit numbers!), so we dug into some first grade activities and games to practice those skills this week. Next week I plan to pick back up where we left off, but incorporate more games to allow students time to practice and reinforce their skills. Who doesn't like playing games?!

Here are the Family Support Materials for the first two Math units:

• Illustrative Math Family Support Materials Unit 1
• Illustrative Math Family Support Materials Unit 2

If you would like some activities to support your child with math at home, please let me know.

Science
On Thursday, we spent almost the entire morning doing Science! Students designed and constructed prototypes to prevent hillside erosion. They worked in small groups and used a combination rocks, burlap, popsicle sticks, toothpicks, and plastic bags and explored how to stop dripping water (rain) from eroding a hillside (a small pile of sand on a slope). They wrote statements about the purpose of their designs, drew before and after sketches, and then analyzed the results. I think we learned some valuable lessons about how different materials interact with water. We also learned some new vocabulary, like "anchor," "divert," "permeable," and "impermeable." Next week we will learn about real life erosion engineering solutions!

​​Thank you for reading! Please reach out with any questions or feedback. Have a great week!

Below, students working in groups during our Erosion engineering activity during Science; and a picture high school performers previewing the RMHS drama, Scrooge.