I'm thrilled to have the kiddos back and ready for action! Our first day back went fairly smoothly, and we are dusting away cobwebs to make room for new learning and to recall the old. We enter the final half of the year where I begin to let loose the reigns and expect the students to take full ownership of their learning. We will continue to work together of course, but I'm really promoting "struggle/think time" so they will do the hard thinking, build their brains, and continue growing as independent thinkers. I will be requiring more interaction and thought from each student. We will be most successful with full participation and "ready-to-learn"ness. I ask that you strongly encourage your child to listen well the first time so as to avoid asking repeated questions, have fun but keep comments appropriate and on task, and to be willing to make mistakes in order to learn and move forward. Such skills can be difficult or more difficult for some. We're working on strategies to improve our learning abilities and skills, but I will appreciate your support. :)
Please note we will dive into Reading Comprehension Passages more frequently: In order to have students demonstrate their reading stamina and use all their reading comprehension skills they will be taking one or two reading passages weekly. Our class will typically do this on Thursday or Friday. While this has proven over the years to be invaluable practice which makes kids more confident going into STAAR testing, sometimes Reading grades will slip. We are also scheduled to take a STAAR-Ready reading and math tests in February -- think of it as a practice! Students will be given the full 4 hours to complete.
I'm very excited about what is coming our way in the next few weeks!
In Reading, Writing and Socials Studies, we will put our reading and research skills to use as we discover and read about inventors, innovators, and explorers. While reading, we want to make sure we use our strategies to find the main ideas of our texts, causes and effects, character traits, and paraphrase information in our own words.
Your child will have the opportunity to "become" a person of their choice whom they will research and produce a biographical work explaining their person's importance. The final product will come through their Inventor's Museum. You are invited to join us on Friday Feb. 8th. Your student will have a general timeline for phases of the assignment and will present their hard work in a presentation. You will receive a letter explaining and describing the project in Thursday folders.
In Math, we will continue identifying attributes of geometric figures and 3D figures. We will also learn how to find the rectangular area of objects. This is a challenging skill, for which I plan to post helpful web links for extra practice soon.
In Social Studies, we're identifying the attributes of rural, suburban, and urban communities. Speak with your child about the type of community you live in, how that community was likely formed, factors that could change your community, how it's different from other types of communities. We will also "travel" to other well-known urban communities such as New Orleans, Cairo, Tokyo, and Mexico City to compare their climates, culture, origins, natural resource and landforms (which also tie into science).
In Science, we're uncovering facts about natural resources and the characteristics that make them useful for everyday products. We will speak about conversation, reducing, reusing, and recycling as well as how and why types of soil are important to our environments and livelihoods.
