Newsletter: December 12th

Dear Families,

As winter break approaches, we are still awfully hard at work in the classroom launching, continuing, and wrapping up a variety of inquiries. Check out our photos to learn all about the work we are doing in (and out of) the classroom. I apologize that the captions end about halfway down. For some reason, blogger is glitching on me and deleting photos when I try to add captions to a number of them. Rather than fight with technology I'm going to let those photos do their own talking. They show the kids learning about money, poetry, and responding to current news articles. Enjoy!

We recently wrapped up an inquiry into reading fluency. During this study we listened to various
guest readers and took notes on what we noticed about their voices that made the story
so engaging and easy to follow. This included (but was not limited to): paying attention to the
 punctuation, making voices for characters, matching our voices to the feeling
of the story, changing from fast to slow, changing from loud to quiet, stretching some
words out, and reading with a rhythm. We practiced this in our own daily reading. At the
end of the inquiry we practiced and performed "readers theater" skits for the class. It
was a blast!

And of course, we've been to the Richland County Public Library!

In math, we used the cans we were collecting to support the learning we were doing
with computation. The kids worked to sort the cans in different ways then represent
their groups by creating bar graphs.

Their groupings were very creative. Some sorted by can size while others
focused on other features such as materials, types of foods, and type
of can top.

We also created line plots to represent our data. It was a wonderful way to
make connections between our food drive and all we've been learning together
this year.