Newsletter: February 16th

 Hello Everyone,

A lot has happened since last we wrote. We've met with a couple state legislators, celebrated our 100th day of school, and launched all kinds of inquiries that center around a broader study of animals. Here's a recap:

100th Day of School 

The students (and us!) had a blast on our 100^th Day of School! Some students came dressed in their pajamas and we even had a few students dressed up as 100-year-olds. The students enjoyed counting to 100 through singing and dancing, playing a Math game adding up to 100 and competing in 100 second challenges. Did you know they could do 60+ jumping jacks in 100 seconds?! In addition, a handful of students brought in and shared with the class different collections of 100. Collections ranged from Uno cards to Orbeez to Cheerios.

Science

Last week, the students shifted over to science from social studies. They have begun to learn about how animals are sorted into different groups based on their skin, habitats, young, and much more. This week, the students split into groups and became experts on either mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish or birds and then taught the rest of their classmates about it! 

Reading

In reading, we have been learning comprehension strategies to help us better understand non-fiction texts. This has included understanding and using the many text and visual features these books often include (maps, headers, photos and captions, labels, etc), asking questions of the text, and making connections between what we're reading and what we've read or seen in other places. Many of the books we've read during this inquiry have drawn from what we're learning in Social Studies about government, bills, and the work people do to fight for fair laws and what we're learning in science about animals.

Writing

In writing, we're in the midst of animal research - finding, recording and organizing facts as we prepare to write non-fiction books of our own. These are going to be a large step up from other informational writing pieces they've done in the past. Their final pieces will include many of the non-fiction features we've been learning about in reading.

Math

Math is the one part of the day that doesn't really have anything to do with animals. We just finished up learning how to solve subtraction problems that call on us to regroup and are now launching a study of geometry and fractions. Over the past week and a half the kids have been identifying shapes with different numbers of sides and angles and calculating the area and perimeter of squares and rectangles. As the week progresses we will begin partitioning these shapes into fractional parts - particularly halves and fourths.