Week 9 Highlights

This week in Room 307 we wrapped up many of our units and spent time outside for some more gardening with our Leschi Garden coordinator, Kim Blakemore. The weather held up for the most part, and students were able to build trellises and help weed and tend the garden. It is always such a nice change of pace to be outdoors and learning with our hands and working cooperatively in groups!

Finishing up our content area units means that we are starting new ones this week! Here are some of the updates:

Highlights:
-Realistic fiction published pieces are due on Monday and we will be embarking on a new social studies and writing integrated unit on civics! Using the election day this past week as a starting point, we will be learning about the three branches of government, Constitution, past presidents, and role playing different members in our government. The next couple of weeks will be spent learning about all of these topics, and after our fall conferences, students will be writing expert books/research papers on a topic of choice within our civics unit. This nonfiction unit will be a very different change of pace from our previous narrative writing.

-Math will transition more into small groups and individual lessons in the next coming weeks! We have started our fractions unit and students will need much hands-on practice and individualized instruction.
-As we ended our science unit on Models & Designs with our final go-cart challenges, we will begin another new social studies unit: Toy Company. This mini-unit is geared towards economics and learning how businesses work. Please ask your child about what role they play in the Toy Company and what item they will be selling in the next coming weeks - it will be exciting and engaging for all of us!

-We finished up our character unit along with our read aloud Something to Hold. Students completed a final project where they collaboratively with their reading partner designed and authored a poster recreating an Amazon Book Listing. Click here for the actual Amazon page, and up in our hallway, we will have our posters up - please check them out! Here are students working on their posters. It was amazing for me watch students work so well together without much guidance from me at all: they compromised when needed, shared the workload without me assigning, and figured out their strengths and weaknesses to divvy up the work.

-Veterans Day is on Tuesday, and in our classroom this week, we did a web-quest to learn more information about its history and why we celebrate this important day. Web-quests are inquiry-oriented lessons/projects where students research information using the internet in a guided format. We will be working on more web-quests throughout this year to hone our research skills and prepare for the Smarter Balanced Assessment in the spring!

Reminder: please return the pink field trip form this week for 826 Seattle. Also, thank you to parents who signed up to bring potlucks items for our Thanksgiving Lunch next Friday, 11/21!