We had an awesome first full week. The kids are quickly settling into a comfortable, enthusiastic and helpful community. They set a positive example for our younger Wildcats as they walked quietly through the halls, invited one another to play at recess, and demonstrated appropriate behavior during our fire drills. I'm thrilled to spend the year with them, cultivating a working and social environment in which we can grow and thrive.
4th Grade Math: Our first unit is called "Naming and Constructing Geometric Figures." This week we reviewed rays, lines, angles and quadrilateral shapes. It's quite a lot for the kids to take in as their first week of math! Next week we'll begin an online math-facts program to improve math fluency called Xtra Math. Students will have an opportunity to work on their number sense and fact recall even through this first "non-number" unit; they'll continue to do for the duration of the year.
5th Grade Math: Check out Ms. Wennerberg's website and newsletter for updates: http://www.op97.org/swennerberg/
Writing: We've spent this first week gathering LOTS of ideas and building excitement and confidence. Each day I've used the mini-lesson time to teach a new strategy for finding an idea to write about. We've used "writing from a name," "writing from a list," writing from a word," and "writing from a book" as ways to spark creativity. I've also given two homework prompts that have yielded hilarious (and legitimately impressive) ideas. Our next steps will be to choose one of these ideas to develop into our first writing pieces. More to come at curriculum night!
Reading: To kick off our year, we're combining a review of reading strategies with a whole-class novel called The View From Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg. This book has several wonderful themes including friendship, acceptance, perseverance and cooperation. It is told in a complicated way, with flashbacks and multiple points of view, so it provides the perfect opportunity for me to read it with them as a model. We'll use a timeline to understand chronology, a character map and profiles to keep everybody straight, and guided vocabulary and questions. We're about 28 pages in, and the kids are loving it already!
Social Studies: Check out Ms. Wennerberg's website and newsletter for updates: http://www.op97.org/swennerberg/
Science: Our first science unit is a mini-unit on Mealworms which will introduce us to the Scientific Method. Students will research mealworms using texts and online sources, then develop an experiment to do to practice using the scientific process. When their research and experiments are complete, they'll write a scientific magazine article to report their findings. This unit is great because it allows for cross-curricular learning. The kids will analyze non-fiction text features and use these model texts to guide their writing. All this before the mealworms turn to beetles!!
Miscellaneous:
- ALL band/orchestra students MUST sign up for band online (or contact Ms. Vogt or Ms. Korelc if you do not have internet access). Here is the link: http://www.op97.org/avogt/ (note that this will take you to Ms. Vogt's band page, but the links apply to band and orchestra)
