Week 6 Highlights

Hello 307 families! This is Ms. Trapp. For those of you I have not met yet, I am a Resident Teacher this year in Room 307 and a graduate student at the University of Washington. If you’re interested in learning more about the Seattle Teacher Residency, check out the website: STR. It has been a pleasure working with and getting to know your students so far and I am so excited to learn along with them this year!

Reminders:
1. Please make sure to sign up for a conference time if you have not already!
2. 5th grade families: Please turn in any remaining camp paperwork and money. Camp is less than two weeks away!

Highlights:
-On Monday, we recognized Seattle’s first Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which coincided with Columbus Day. Students watched videos and read from books representing multiple views on the holiday and the change in Seattle. We considered bias in historical accounts and students were encouraged to examine the issue from multiple perspectives.
-Writing: This week we celebrated the end of our personal narrative writing unit with a celebration with Ms. Deese’s class. Students were able to show off their stories and all of their hard work, as well as have a chance to read their classmates’ stories in a gallery walk. We also started a new realistic fiction writing unit. Students created plans for their characters, mapped out their story arcs, and many began drafting their stories.

-Math: Students were introduced to order of operations in math and focused on identifying problem solving strategies for complicated word problems. We will be reviewing in the coming week for the second math unit test. As a class, we also examined and created bar models, which are a problem-solving tool used heavily in our new math curriculum.
-Reading: We are finishing up our read aloud, Something to Hold. This week, we considered why characters act the way they do, examined how characters change and grow throughout stories, and considered the importance of passages that make us feel strong emotions. Students also selected new books that they will be reading with their reading partners. Next Tuesday, Katherine Schlick Noe, the author of Something to Hold (and Ms. Staab's graduate program literacy professor), will join our class to read from and discuss her book!
-Science: In science, we continued our work with go-carts. Students explored how gravity can make things move, designing ramps for their go-carts. Erica, one of our 4th grade classmates, also presented her snap circuit project and diagram to the class, continuing our discussion on electricity from the humdinger project. We now have a snap circuit set for students to use during free choice time!