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First Research Project and Other News

Aug28

Happy Friday!  We finished out our first week with full school days and your kids are doing great!  Learning how to plan and manage time has been the focus of this week’s morning activities, while observing and learning to distinguish the difference between facts and inference has taken place in the afternoon.  Your kids know a lot of facts about the teeth of T-Rex!  I’m impressed.

We have been doing a lot of writing with our observations and morning dictionary work, so if your kids are complaining of sore hands, it’s for good reason.

We began our first in class research project this afternoon with the reading of From Lava to Life, a story that supports our second Great Lesson, The Coming of Life.  You will find a description of the project here, Time line of Life Research Book Project , along with the rubric for scoring.  This will mainly be an in class project, due Friday September 4, but so many of your kids were excited to get started that they brought it home to work on.  If your students brought home their rubric, you will notice the total points possible is an error.  It states 50 pts, while the total should be 55 pts possible.  I have corrected it on the link.

As per our classroom management plan, your children should have brought home their weekly work evaluation form completely filled out for you to sign.  This must be returned with them on Monday.  Please ask them about this evaluation, it is a key tool, along with their planners, to see the progress they are making and to get an idea of the work they are doing each day in the classroom.  We have spoken a bit about goal setting (with many more discussions to come) and how specific goals are much more meaningful than a general goal of say, “work harder”.  We are talking about setting SMART goals as a tool for success in the classroom and out.  If your child has written “work harder” or “get a lot done” as their goal for next week, now is a great time to have a conversation with them about setting goals that are specific and measurable.

Finally, before this post becomes even longer, our school’s annual 5K Race for the Redwoods is on September 19 with a pancake breakfast to follow.  All proceeds from the race and the Pancake Breakfast support our 6th grade trip to the Redwoods!  This is an amazing experience that is worth every bit of your support.   Come support our school community and get to know each other!  In addition to a registration form for the race being sent home with your child, you can find additional copies at the following link.  Race for the Redwoods Registration

I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Ms. Amity

 

 

This Week in Room 24

Mar9

This week we finished watching the BBC’s Planet Earth: Mountains program.  The students loved it!  With amazing photography, well presented facts and Sir David Attenborough narrating, who wouldn’t love it?!

This program kicked off our biome study and our next group project.  The students were broken into groups, given a mountain range to study and a general list of expectations.  Within their groups, the students can decide how they would like to break up their workload.   It will be a fantastic learning process for the students in our class as they figure out how to work with each other to create a presentation that they will share with the class March 28th.

Today we also started our poetry unit, beginning with a figurative language review, using lyrics from pop songs to illustrate metaphor, simile, hyperbole and personification.  The students have interactive notebook pages to work on to help drive the concept home (no pun intended).

Level 6 spent the morning working on an open ended question that allowed them to practice math, language and critical thinking skills.  We will have more problems like this in the future to stretch their comfort zone and allow them freedom to explore.  This week we also discussed the first continental congress and the students chose one of the intolerable acts to present to the group.  This is a small research project, one that will be done completely in class.

Level 5 students were given a lesson on the difference between estimating and guessing.  We used a jar of pennies as our prop.  They were then asked to answer several questions and complete a graph using their data.  This week in science we were lucky enough to have Ms. Amy’s dad, Mr. Bob, give a lesson about electromagnets.  He also brought all of the supplies for building electromagnets.  It was a big hit amongst the kids.