Thank you to families for fitting in yet another conference during this very busy season. Nearly all of our parent-teacher conferences have been scheduled. It has been nice to meet with you and hear what your learning goals are for your child. If you haven’t had a chance to schedule a meeting and would like to, please don’t hesitate to send a note or email. I am looking forward to meeting with you.

Invisible Forces

We’ve begun to explore our final invisible force, magnetism. We’ve explored the pushes and pull of gravity and the resistance that friction creates. Now we are exploring magnetism. Many of the children know that Earth is a giant magnet and suspect that life wouldn’t be the same without magnetism. Would Earth be wobbly? Would weather and ocean currents change? While we may not discover concrete proof to answer those questions we should be able to discover the properties of magnets and learn how magnetism is used in motors and with electricity to reduce friction and make them run more efficiently. For now they are fun.

We are learning what things have magnetic attractions. We are learning about the push and pull at the poles. We are exploring to see if different types of magnets are stronger than others. And we are exploring to see how far reaching a magnetic force can be?

Thinking About Narrative Writing

Now that our first informational writing piece and project is completed, the children have a much wider choice during writing. This is a challenge for some of them. They are having difficulty managing their behavior to do the hard work of developing an idea. All this week we’ve been sharing books that have been about the writing process. We’ve been asking the class to think about where they are in their composition process.

In addition to working their writers’ notebooks, many of the children have been choosing to add posts to their blogs. They’ve been typing over some of the personal narratives they wrote in the beginning of the year. Others are writing and illustrating poems. And still others are writing stories and creating step-by-step how-tos with original illustrations that they’ll scan in to share. Writing is a creative, productive time in 3E.

Telling Time – and Using What we Know

to Learn Multiplying by 5

You’ll notice that many of the math problems this week deal with telling time, keeping track of the time that has passed and thinking about the clock as a rounded timeline. I think most of the children are feeling pretty certain of how to tell time. and to calculate how time is passing both in the classroom. There is a lot to consider when working with time and working in groups of 60 for hours. Encourage your child to tell you the time or to tell you what time it will be when… so they can figure out real-life time elapse problems. Any opportunity you can give them to practice reading clocks/watches and telling time is greatly appreciated.

Bits and Pieces

• We have a challenge with Mr. Caron on December 15. Children should be prepared to be outside and it can be chilly in the woods.
• We’ve had fun learning our first set of cursive letters. See if you child can explain to you why they are called “clock climbers.”
• We’re still enjoying School Days According to Humphrey LOTS-LOTS-LOTS.