There was a lot of excitement this week, much of which was due to the FIRST snow on the FIRST day of December. In the words of one of the kids "it's practically magic." We also had two birthdays this week, and our Hubbard Street fieldtrip today.
We continued talking about friendship in STAND this week. It was interesting to hear the kids' responses to the question 'how do friendships grow?' and 'how do friendships fade?' Ask your kids about who their close friends are vs. who their casual friends are, and how those friendships grow and/ or fade.
Reading: We've been working on personal responses to the text. A personal response is where the kids respond to an open-ended question with a short essay. There are three major components: the answer itself, evidence from the text to support the answer, and a personal connection or opinion to the answer. Their responses have grown much stronger after only one test due to the strong student examples I've been able to use in mini lessons. It's great to see their improvements so tangibly.
Writing: We finished our final drafts of our essays this week! Organization was the big focus for this first essay. They generally have a difficult time deriving specific examples from their main idea to support their writing. It was interesting to see how strong they were at revising their peer's work, yet how they couldn't identify the same errors in their own work. We did a LOT of work with transition sentences, clear details in our examples, revisions, etc. Again we used student work for the mini lessons. .
Science: We've completed all of the body systems, the digestive system was our last one. Now we'll transition into 'keeping those systems healthy' through exercise, healthful eating, sleep, etc. We'll look at the food pyramid and healthful life habits like exercise and sleep.
Miscellaneous:Math: Unit 4 covers Decimals, money, and measurement. We've studied place value through the thousandths, and now we're learning about how the metric system and our currency system use 'tens' like decimals. Ask your kids to convert decimals into fractions like "9/10= 0.9"
- Send your kids with gloves, hats and scarves. The playground is SO cold after 35 minutes of playtime at lunch!!
- SIT Family Night - Holiday Showcase
Do you have a special holiday or tradition (which can include music and dance) that you would like to share with the Whittier Community? We invite you to participate in our Family Night that will be held on Wednesday, December 15th from 5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. at Whittier. Please send an email to kmoore@op97.org with a brief description of the holiday tradition and any potential activity or craft that you would like to showcase that evening.
This week's author: Logan
On Monday we had a really fun Social Studies. We are doing our explorer simulations! Tuesday was Ethel's 11th birthday.
Wednesday was the first day of Hannukah and it was Julia's birthday. Thursday the 5th graders did Reading Olympics. Ethel, Clare and Emma won!
Friday we had Hubbard Street and started reading "A Christmas Carol."
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