Newsletter: January 21, 2021

 

Dear Families,

In this week's newsletter Ms. Schoenherr and I will speak to the some of the things the kids are currently working on as social scientists, writers and mathematicians. 

Writing Workshop

As the kids continue to share out the fiction pieces they recently published they are also being given time to work on "free write" pieces. Free write pieces offer an opportunity to write in any genre what-so-ever and serve as a bit of a breather from our more formal genre studies that often have them concentrating on a single piece of writing for as much as a couple of weeks at a time. Some of the things they have chosen to write include joke books, comic books, superhero stories, memory stories, and even plays. They'll be sharing these with us via Flipgrid at the end of next week. From there we will use our writing time to prepare for Student Led Conferences (scheduled for February 11th and 12th) and then move onto non-fiction/informative writing. 

Social Studies

We're still in the midst of our inquiry into government and civic action/responsibility. This week the kids worked to brainstorm bills they would love to exist both within our school and within our community to make both an even better place to live and learn for all people. Many of their suggestions centered on issues of kindness and safety. On Friday we will be visited by Patrick Kelly who is a lobbyist for the Palmetto State Teacher's Association (PSTA). He will talk about what lobbyists do to advance concerns and ideas as well as speak  about the fact we can all do similar work as citizens and voters. Next week we'll be visited by Senator Mike Fanning who will build on these same ideals.

Math

As mathematicians, the students have been working hard on subtraction this week. We began with solving subtraction problems where the second number, the subtrahend, is missing (6 - ? = 2). The students used many different subtraction strategies such as counting up, counting down, drawing pictures or thinking about the correlating addition problem to help them solve. We then moved on to solving problems where the first number, the minuend, was unknown using the same strategies (? - 4 = 2). Many of these problems were presented in the form of word problems to help the students make sense of what the correlating number sentence is and what it means. Next week, we will continue with our study of subtraction and move onto subtraction with regrouping!

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That's it for this week. Don't forget Monday is a student holiday. Teachers here at school will be working on progress reports, individual education plans, and assessment - as well as having a whole-faculty discussion about issues related to justice-related work in our classrooms. 

Have a great weekend,

Chris and Katie