General News
Here is the presentation from parent night if you were not able to attend! TLDR, your kids are phenomenal, they are rocking this transition, we are giving them time to grow into new skill sets, and we love them!
Reading/Writing Update
Five paragraph essays seem intimidating at first but we tackled them this week and got into a great flow! Before we wrote a full on research essay we decided to take a step back and write 5 paragraph essays on topics we are already experts on. The topics were fun and light hearted: how to care for cats, soccer, ballet, hosting a great sleepover, writing comic books, favorite mangas, and so much more. We came up with a great visual in class for how the 3 main ideas are the cake part of your essay, your thesis statement is the icing, the candles are the intro paragraph, and the conclusion is the plate. The hardest part about writing a 5 paragraph essay always seems to be the introduction paragraph, but once we got this down the next 3 paragraphs flowed smoothly and the Delta students saw how not intimidating this process actually is! We also practiced picking up the pace a bit this week and getting a project done in one week, which went incredibly well! We are super proud of all their hard work!
Math Update
Math has been a true delight! The kids have been willing to take risks and work hard (and put in some great creativity!) Sometimes I feel like we are in a commercial! 😀Year 1 kiddos learned about a skill that is usually a fan-favorite: order of operations. We knocked out tons of practice and ended the week with some fun cooperative “relay” races and an Order of Operations BINGO game! Year 2 ended the week with the same sort of fun, except they were working on adding and subtracting integers. At week’s end we learned how to multiply and divide with integers and will continue practicing that skill next week. If you weren’t able to come to parent night, note that I like to keep the kids’ P&P after we have reviewed sticky spots in class. If there is something missing, I’ll send it back home with a note. If there are incorrect answers, we’ll review in class and I’ll do my best to ping you so that you know what skills look shaky. Also, remember you can visit Whippermathers to get access to the same graphic organizers we use in class during note-taking, as well as review videos. They are short and sweet and a great way to give kids some changes to review and refresh.
Theme Update
Theme is going great! This week watching the kids mapping skills make leaps and bounds was so exciting! We departed South America and headed to Europe and explored those same five themes of Geography, as with the previous continents we’ve studied. We swear you can actually see lightbulbs going on over kids’ heads as our mapping skills improve! We wanted to give the Deltas a real interactive chance to practice so we turned the theme room into a giant map (using tape on the floor) and provided many chances for interactive exploration. At week’s end, we held a big “battleship” game of “teachers vs. students” and we are sad to say: the teachers were defeated! (We’re not really sad, of course!) Next week, we head to Africa and have a few fun projects cued up for this continent. Many Deltas studied Ancient Africa during our Gamma days, so we suspect this continent will be a high-interest topic and kids will be able to build off of some of that previous knowledge.
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