Newsletter: February 8, 2017

Dear Families,

This week has found us continuing our biography research projects, making initial preparations for Student-Led Conferences (have you signed up???), launching an inquiry into fractions, and beginning to wrap up our study of the American Revolution. We also completed a district writing assessment in which the kids were asked to write an essay drawing evidence from two texts. Here's a bit more information about our work with this assessment as well as our inquiry into fractions.

From Chris...

Article about elephant "refugees"

The purpose of the district writing assessment is to gauge the kids' current comfort level,knowledge of, and ability with essay writing in preparation for a formal test they will take in May as part of SC PASS. To support the kids into this work, I read two articles with the kids on Monday: one about elephants fleeing areas where poaching has become a serious problem and another about the masses of Syrians being displaced by Civil War. We read each article, highlighted the parts that seemed important to us, considered the writing prompt (In what way(s) are the situations of the elephants and the Syrian refugees similar?), jotted down a few possibilities for our responses, chose one based on the amount of support available in the text, circled the supporting information in the text, wrote an opening sentence, drafted essays, revised and edited, and then called it a day. Phew, that's a lot!

One of the kid's opening sentences. We'll later explore different possibilities
for opening this sort of piece. But not for a while.

The kids did a nice job. The next day they were asked to complete the actual district assessment. They read two pieces about people solving problems concerning water. The prompt called on them to compare the ways in which the characters in the two texts solved their problem. Everyone worked really hard and did their best. This is not comfortable writing at all. It is not joyful writing. Yet, it is something we need to look at from time-to-time to ensure everyone is prepared to show all they know when the time comes for SC PASS. We'll now turn our attention back to more meaningful and enriching work - writing our biographies!

The kids wrote these pieces on the computers. If you study the four facial expressions
at the table I think you'll see one of them pretty much sums up our feelings about
spending a solid 90 minutes reading passionless texts and writing essays about them.
That said, the kids really did take this  mandated task seriously and did a fine job.

From Shanna...

In math, we began our fractions unit. Towards the end of last week we began by creating and discussing fraction strips. We went on a fraction scavenger hunt to find various fractions around them room. We will continue to explore our fraction strips using them to help us determine greater than/less than and equivalences.

We also worked on partitioning our classroom tables into equal parts. Students were able to partition the tables into ¾ , ½, ¼  etc. This allowed students to see various representations of fractions.

On Tuesday, we used our fraction strips to play two games fill the whole and the empty the whole. The object of this game was to fill or empty one whole using fraction strips.