Our Week – January 17

We’ve been enjoying The Great Sasquatch Escape and learning how to identify main idea.  We’ve begun to explore global geography and to think about how interesting people are in all parts of the world.  We’re working to put together our national holiday research into interesting and informative presentations and games.  We’re learning about fractions and measurement.  We’re organizing our family stories and learning how to use elaboration strategies to add interest to our writing.  There’s a lot going on in 3E.

The Holiday Palooza

This week we chose the name for the event (see above) where we would share what we’ve been learning about our country’s nine national holidays.  We chose the day, Monday, February 4 and the times 2:00 – 2:40 and 5:15 to 6:00.  We hope everyone in the class will be able to attend at both times to share his/her thinking and learning.  We understand that the later time may be challenging for some families – we hope you’ll be able to fit this event into your full schedules.  Please look in the front of your child’s folder for your personal invitation.

This project has been challenging.  Some of the holidays are rather obscure, while others require a lot of background knowledge to fully understand.  That is something 9-year olds don’t have unless they’ve listened to lots of family stories or are historical fiction readers.   I know I’ve written about this before, but I want you to be ready for what you read and see when you attend the palooza.  The facts tend to be sparse and some are misrepresented, but all has been written with their best effort to connect to the information and understand.

As you tour the children’s displays and play their games, please keep this in mind.  I think it will be exciting for them when they explore more US history in fifth grade.  Then they’ll really put all the pieces together.

Growth Mindset – Considering Others

We have continued to participate in the Growth Mindset Read-Aloud project.  We’ve shared some of our thinking about the books in the project and some others as well.  This challenge fits well with our Open Circlediscussions about behavior.  This week we talked about teasing.  We know that teasing hurtful, and yet it still happens.  We talked about why we tease and how it feels to be the teaser or the teased.  We also talked about what to do, when you realize an intended joke wasn’t received that way.  We’re trying to stand in our classmate’s or our sibling’s shoes and think before we speak. It’s not always easy, but I do think the class is becoming more aware. Logan came up with a great idea to help us think about consequences of our behavior choices.  Talk to your child about what we did and what we realized through the activity.

Measuring Length

We’ve been learning how to read measurement and to write mixed numbers in the proper way.  It seems as though most of the class has mastered that.  We are also learning by example how 2/8 equal ¼ and how 4/8 and 2/4 equal ½. It’s fun to learn about fractions and part of a whole.  We’re learning that sometimes a fraction is one thing cut into smaller equal parts and sometimes a fraction represents a smaller portion of a group. For example, if a class has 16 kids and we say ¼ of the class played on the swings at recess we can figure out that 4 kids were on the swings.  We’ve discovered when we work to answer questions like that we are also learning about division.

Bits and Pieces –

  • We’ve participated in the second week of the Growth Mindset Read-Aloud Project.  We hope to get lots more comments on our blogs through these connections.
  • We are working make responsible book choices so our reading abilities can grow.
  • We’ve not found the time to work on our family stories more this week.  We will spend more time with them next week.
  • We continued to share books that show lots of different people and places in the world.  It is interesting to see different houses, traditional clothing, foods and even different school experiences.  It is amazing to realize how diverse and wonderful the world is.