Here are some updates from this week.
Thank yous!
Thanks to all who came and supported our students at the Family Breakfast on Monday. Thanks also to Peter (Sam's dad) and his friend Tom for coming to school today to teach us about taking care of our new fish.
We Need It!
We will need more snack after the Thanksgiving break.
The 4th grade is collecting pennies to help save the wetlands. We have a collection jar in our room for pennies.
Conferences
A notice was sent home last week with available conference times. I sent home a new form if I have not yet received a conference time for you. I will be sending out confirmations on Tuesday. If you are having difficulty making any of those times, please contact me so I can work something out with you.
Homework
Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, we will not have homework or new word study words next week. Enjoy your vacation!
Curriculum Updates
From now until the winter vacation, we will be exploring the world of the early settlers who came on the Mayflower in 1620. As part of our discussion this past week, we learned about who those people were and what they might be called. Did you know that they weren't originally called "Pilgrims?" Ask your student about all the different things they were called and why. We also joined hundreds of schools across the country this week when we participated in a live webcast from Plimoth Plantation. We heard live interviews with early settlers, the Wampanoag, as well as descendants of both these groups of people. It was very exciting!
As we wrap up 2010, we will continue learning about the "Pilgrims." We will write historical narratives from the perspective of a pilgrim in Writing Workshop, we will be reading scripts and preparing special performances about life in 1620, and we are going to read a lot about the pilgrims in Reading Workshop!
In addition, we are still thinking about rocks as part of our Science unit. This week, students conducted an experiment to see how rock crystals form. We are also uniting our math with our rock study! As we learn about bigger numbers and how to add them, the students will create a class collection. We decided to collect rocks so that we can study them in science as well. In our discussion, students agreed we would only collect rocks that can fit in our hand because our goal is to collect 1,000 rocks!!! You may send in rocks in small bags and we have created a system for organizing them in our room.
Incredibly, there is a special connection with rocks and our social studies unit...Plymouth Rock! If you would like to support this amazing connection, you can do some research to decide what type of rock the Plymouth Rock might be. Some questions to guide the research include: Do you think Plymouth Rock is sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic? How would you find out? We have not yet learned this about rocks but feel free to start exploring the idea!
Have a great weekend!
Thanks for the great blog - samuel and i just read it together.
ReplyDeleteon another subject, we are sitting at the breakfast table trying to figure out this week's bonus math problem, circle sums.
we managed to use the #s 1-6, putting a different # in each circle (arranged in a triangle, 3 circles per side) so the sum of each side 1s 10.
But the next problem asks you to use the same numbers and put a different # in each circle so that the sum of each side is 11.
how?!
Thanks Amy!
ReplyDeleteThe solution is: on one side 4-1-6, another side 6-3-2, on the last side 2-5-4.
oh, but didn't the instructions say only one number per circle (i.e. no repeated numbers, in which case six could only be used once), or was that for the first pyramid only? we read the instructions together and i mad sam redo the first one because he repeated some numbers.
ReplyDelete(this is not an earth-shattering issue, i realize.)