Week of November 27th - December 1st

Hi Families,
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break! Students returned to school in great spirits and with renewed focus despite the annoying cold circulating in almost everyone, including me. We kicked off the month of December with lots of intellectually stimulating activities and work!

Important Dates

• Saturday December 2nd: Winter Craft Fair, Holiday Brunch with Friends of Reading METCO, & REF Festival of Trees
• Monday, December 4th: Report Cards emailed out; Special Guest Gabriela Hortopan (Stefan's mom) to teach us about her amazing work in genetics!
• Thursday, December 7th: Early Release; Parent Teacher Conferences
• Friday, December 8th: No School, Parent Teacher Conferences

Important Notes

• Parent Teacher Conferences:  I’m looking forward to meeting with you all next week for Fall Conferences! 

Here are some highlights from this week:

Community Building
This week we learned about how to be assertive when asking for help or communicating with each other. We compared being assertive with being aggressive and being passive, practicing language, body positions, and tone of voice that help us communicate with peers and teachers in a respectful way. We also played a new Morning Meeting game called Silent Ball.

Literacy
We continue in week 3 of our informational unit on Bugs. This week, we focused on the needs of all animals and how bugs meet their needs within their environment. Students read informational texts, took notes, and wrote short responses summarizing what they read. I also read aloud from our knowledge-building whole-class text on insects. We learned new vocabulary words, such as “colony,” “chamber,” and “aggressive.” Students then answered literal, inferential, and evaluative questions about the read aloud in complete sentences orally with a partner. They’re getting so much better at this!

Phonics and Foundational Skills
This week we split off into groups so that I could work on a review of targeted phonics skills with students that need more practice. One group worked on applying their phonics skills in reading and writing tasks. The other group worked with me on review of previously taught skills, particularly phonemic awareness, the FLSZ doubling rule, spelling with “ck,” vowel-consonant e, and recognizing and spelling words with suffixes, especially “-ed,” which makes 3 different sounds depending on the final sound in the base word. Very tricky for spelling!

Writing
This week we worked on our informational writing skills. We practiced expanding sentences about insects using linking words and our insect knowledge and vocabulary. Some students also worked on writing summaries of informational texts. At the end of the week, we took our notes and wrote paragraphs about how our bugs meet their needs within their surroundings. 

Math
We launched Unit 3  on Measuring Length. We did some fun measuring activities using non-standard units of measurement to learn about the importance of using standard units. We then learned about centimeters. We created our own rulers to learn about why it is important to have equal intervals. We finished the week learning about and using rulers to measure various classroom objects as accurately as possible in centimeters.

Social Studies
This week we began our unit on Maps and Globes. We learned about different map projections (Ptolemy, Mercator, and Peters) and how maps have changed over time. We learned some new vocabulary words, such as “cartographer,” “navigation,” and “distortion.” We also discussed the “eternal dilemma” of mapmakers trying to represent a sphere on a flat surface.

​​Thank you for taking the time to read the update! Please reach out with any questions.

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