General News
We’ll be sending home unfinished theme art projects next week for P&P (with no packet to complete other than an interest survey regarding our end-of-quarter continental culture project!)
Reading/Writing Update
This week we chose our topics and began researching to write five paragraph essays about medieval Korea. The topics selected vary widely and these will be very fun to research, write, and share! Across the Delta room we are learning about the government of the Goryeo dynasty, social hierarchy during this time, festivals, religion, and, of course, celadon pottery. We started the week off with choosing our topic and brainstorming questions, because all good research starts with great questions! We also had a lesson on how to find good resources when doing research, including skipping over the AI summary to go find actual websites with helpful information. We talked about websites that are good sources, like .org, .edu, Britannica, and museum websites. Research is a challenging skill that requires identifying key words, evaluating if a website will be helpful for you, notetaking, paraphrasing, and so much more. We’ll keep plugging away at it next week!
Math Update
In Math this week, 5th graders started multiplying with decimals. We began the week coloring decimal multiplication using models. This is always a great way to start the unit as kids can begin to understand that multiplication doesn’t ALWAYS make a number get bigger. We practiced NOT lining up the decimals (unlike last week’s skill of adding and subtracting) and counting over spaces to place the decimal in the product. Students are encouraged to always estimate BEFORE solving so that they can determine their answers’ reasonableness. Year 2 climbed a steep hill this week as we practiced order of operations with integers. Since the “rules” for adding/subtracting and multiplying/dividing can be confusing and easy to mix, this week gave us practice doing both at the same time! Next week, we’ll move to fraction land! (We’ll also do a math check-in so that students can self-assess their understanding.)
Theme Update
We headed to Africa this week! Students were grouped into teams of 4-5 deltas and decided which activity they would most like to tackle out of a four station rotation (North, South, East and West!) Each station held information packets about the different countries located in the specific region of Africa and was organized (again) along those famous five themes of geography so that kids continue to get practice understanding those rather complex categories. They are getting SO much more skilled–it’s lovely to witness! The next day, we carried on to a new activity where kids selected which mapping activity they would like to tackle to help explore some details about African land features. At each class’ end, we would bust out more art materials than you can image and kids crafted an individual Africa artifact to demonstrate their newfound Africa knowledge. (Unfinished Africas will come home for P&P next week, but there will not be a packet to complete outside of an interest survey for our end-of-quarter project.) On Thursday, groups reconvened to create a script summarizes their favorite facts learned over the week. Each group member participated in a “mini-podcast” recording so that our final projects can be enhanced with an audio QR code explaining what we learned. Neat-o! Next week, we head to Asia!
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