General News
We are so happy to be back together again! Conferences have been delightful and we look forward to more tomorrow! We got into the groove of Q2 together quickly this week! We’ve started preparing for the Halloween carnival next week – upper school is in charge of making games and activities for the lower school! The Deltas are delighted to be taking on a leadership role in the school.
Reading/Writing Update
This week we jumped into a new unit. Delta students were offered two book options: The 14th Goldfish by Jennfer Holm or The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jaqueline Kelly. Both books go along well with our new Theme unit exploring the history of the earth! Kiddos read a chapter of each book to select for “just right level” as well as interest and general appeal. Once their books were selected, they got into book club groups and decided together how much they would read this week to come back Monday prepared to discuss. We ended the week with some fun games about world building and setting to warm up our creative writing muscles for a bigger writing project in a couple of weeks!
Math Update
We had a really productive week in math! The kids jumped back into the math routine with more gusto than expected following a week off! (It was exciting!) Year 1 kids are starting the quarter exploring the process of factorization: both finding ALL the factors of a number via a “factor rainbow” or finding just the PRIME factors via “factor trees.” (We also spent some time “building” primes on a hundreds chart while also learning some nifty divisibility tricks!) Factorization will prime the pump for next week’s skill: fractions, here we come! And fractions are on the way out for Year 2 kids who had a tough week of using ALL operations with mixed numbers (with subtraction with regrouping with unlike denominators being the top of the mountain!) We also conquered some fraction application story problems and learned there was a divide between knowing the algorithm and knowing how/when to apply it! (SO important!) We will continue to work on application. Next week, we’re heading into some new territory for Ms. Lorrie who hasn’t had the joy of teaching 6th grade math in a large handful of years! (I’m PUMPED!) We’ll move into some super-fun 6th grade math skills: ratios, rates and (drumroll, please…) PROPORTIONS! So fun!
Theme Update
Suddenly, Delta Airlines just cancelled all outgoing tickets and apparently our trip around the world is over. Now, we are traveling back in time to explore the history of the earth. Students (and parents…and teachers!) will notice that the pacing and content will feel different since we are now in a Science unit and with a little less time pressure to cover the entire globe in one quarter! We will be able to sprinkle in some fun experiments along the way to help kids internalize the steps of the scientific method. In fact, we hosted our first lab this week using glow sticks and ghostly cups filled with water of various temperatures. We formed a hypothesis, named our variables and controls, executed the experiment, collected data and then summarized our conclusions. The kids did AMAZING! Pay special attention to this week’s P&P: kids are selecting a topic to research for their informational research paper. We are really nudging kids (HARD!) to pick a topic that is truly of interest to them. This will make the whole process more engaging and less stressful! (Take it from 5th Grade Ms. Lorrie who just picked the first thing on a list to get it over with!) Guess what? The Bob Bullock Museum is hosting a special exhibit and IMAX show that caters to our very timely theme focus. We get to visit on December 10th! Look for an email begging…um, we mean ASKING, if you have time/energy/availability to chaperone! It should be a really fun field trip: exhibit, IMAX and picnic lunch! (P.S. We are so excited about conferences, field trips, ghostly experiments and carnivals that our pictures kinda stink this week! Forgive!)
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