Week of November 18-22

Hi Families,
It was wonderful to meet with you all for parent teacher conferences. I enjoyed each of our conversations and thinking together about how to best support and coach your child. I promised some of you materials to use for support at home, but I’m a bit behind in pulling it all together. Thank you for your patience! 

We had a busy full week! Teachers often call this month “No-School November” because of the many sprinkled days off this month. This week was our 1st and only solid 5-day week in November and I feel like students did a great job working hard, focusing, and growing into a warm, welcoming community of learners.

Here is what we’ve been up to this week:

Buddies!
We met with our buddies and worked on a craft for the Turkey Trot next week.

Math 
Unit 3: Multiplying and Dividing Fractions
  This week we learned about multiplying fractions and how to model this multiplication using a diagram. Students did a great job drawing arrays using the denominators as the length and width and then shading in the parts given by the numerators. We then solidified our understanding of fraction multiplication to be numerator times numerator over denominator times denominator. We also explored how to multiply 2 mixed numbers either by turning the mixed numbers into improper fractions or separately multiplying all of the parts and then adding them all together.

• Ask your child to draw you a diagram that shows ⅓ x ⅖ 

English Language Arts
Unit 2: Ecosystems: Matter, Energy, and Organisms.
  We learned about consumers this week. Using words like herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, and scavenger, students wrote about the unique consumers in the ecosystem they are researching. Students wrote about how the consumer gets their energy, their water, their nutrients, their adaptations, and what they give back to their environment.
  For language skills, we focused on using linking words to signal to readers how our ideas connect in our writing. We also learned about subjects and predicates and verb tense/number. Students practiced these skills using the knowledge they’ve gained from our study of ecosystems.

• Ask your child to define herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores, and ask them to provide an example of each from their ecosystem.

Science
Unit 2: Earth’s Materials
  We wrapped up our unit on types of rocks, properties of minerals, tectonic plates, and the rock cycle. We conducted a fun experiment to test which rock sample is most vulnerable to mechanical weathering, sandstone, scoria, or marble. Students thoroughly enjoyed shaking rocks in a jar to simulate mechanical weathering. We compared the amount of sediment retrieved after each shaking session, collected data as a class, and discovered, surprisingly, that the marble rock was most vulnerable to mechanical weathering. We learned that this is because marble is a softer rock than sandstone or scoria on the Mohs Hardness Scale, which means it is more likely to damage with physical force. We took an open-book assessment on the concepts covered in this unit on Friday.

Last week we had a visit from Science from Scientists and made slime. Students compared the properties of two types of slime and learned that one ingredient can influence an object’s properties.

We will be switching to Social Studies for the remainder of the calendar year.

Community Building
We had a couple of class conversations about self-regulation and social-emotional skills. This week we discussed impulse control, which has been interfering with teaching and learning lately. We also discussed accepting and celebrating each other’s differences, recognizing that school can be hard for many students, and that we should do our best not to make our peers feel bad about their struggles.

Our Morning Meetings have been a little more fun than usual this week. I noticed that students were a little more open and encouraging with their classmates. We also had a class-wide dance party to our clean-up song, and the kids looked like they were all having a blast. So nice to see!

Homework
Here is the usual reminder: Don’t forget to check your child’s reading log in their planner each week, have them total their minutes for the week, and sign your name next to the total by Monday morning. You can stay on top of your child’s homework with my Homework Assignment Log.

Important Dates: 

• Wednesday, November 27: Turkey Trot and 11:00AM Dismissal 
• Thursday and Friday, November 28 & 29: No School, Thanksgiving Break

Thank you for reading! Have a great weekend!

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