Newsletter: February 22, 2017

Dear Families,

Thanks so much for making it in for our Student Led Conferences over the past week. The kids are always excited, if not a little nervous, to show off the work that has taken place over the course of the school year. It really is a nice opportunity for them to reflect on all they've learned. Now here's a look at some of the things going on in the classroom right now...


From Chris

We've continued our work as biographers in literacy workshop. This is certainly is a BIG project we've undertaken. At the same time, it's also incredibly rich in opportunities to  learn about reading non-fiction, determining importance, organizing information, accessing text features, creating outlines for our writing, paragraphing to help our readers better understand how information fits together, and much more.

This is the outline I created for my biography of Malala Yousafzai. The kids
created a very similar outline for their own biographies.

Ms. Wilson helped the kids create outlines for their writing. To do so, they listed each of their anticipated chapters (childhood, family, adulthood, career, etc) then made a plan for what each of the paragraphs within these chapters would be about, based on the information they gathered a few weeks ago. These paragraphs provide a further opportunity to learn more about topic sentences and supporting information.

Over the next few weeks we'll continue to write our biographies, go back into our texts to find missing information, edit, revise, create a cover for our books, then finally publish. We are aiming to be finished before March 10th so we can share all we've done at Gathering (this will be our class' final Gathering presentation of the year). We'll also have a Share Fair in which we share our projects in greater detail with the rest of the school. Believe me when I tell you that the kids will be very proud of themselves. This is hard, but rewarding, work!

And now...here are some fun pics of the kids performing and recording the songs they wrote in writing workshop a few weeks ago!

From Shanna

This past week in math we have continued to work with fractions. The students were split into three groups and they rotated around to three different stations. The different stations helped kids practice and learn fractions in three ways. We learned about fractions of a set, fractions of a whole, and fractions in a linear model (such as a number line). 

At the end of the week, we will use a formative assessment to identify the students' areas of strength as well as potential areas of growth. This will determine what steps we will take next as a class in our fraction study. According to the South Carolina State Standards, the students should be able to compare fractions, determine their equivalence, and recognize fractions in a set, area, and/or linear model.