Week of January 7th

This week we finished our Unit on Long Ago and Today- Native Americans. The team created a project for their final project. They had a choice to make a poster, a model or a report. They all chose a poster or model. They were asked to decide whether they would have liked to live long ago with the Native Americans or to continue to live today and then to show why on their project. They did an amazing job on their projects showing why they preferred the time period that they did. Check out the photos on the Smilebox. They shared their projects today in small groups.

 In math we are continuing with our geometry unit. We talked a lot this week about how we can use triangles to create other shapes such as trapezoids, rhombuses, or hexagons. We also solved spatial problems where students had to try and make larger shapes with these pattern blocks but use the least amount of pattern blocks possible. They did a great job!!

Taylor Rapke is a student from UVM who has begun her student teaching in our classroom. You have a letter from her in the Friday folder. She will be with us until the first week of May. We are very excited to have her with us!

 In writing we have started a unit on Opinion writing. We did an on-demand piece Monday to see what we would need to work on. We will be using Mentor texts to write pieces about our opinions over the next couple of weeks. Then we will use prompts to write opinions.

 On Thursday we had Hands on Nature. I'd like to Thank Cecelia, Lynn and Caitlin for coming in and teaching our class about skulls and teeth of prey and predators. They talked about the different kinds of teeth and how to decide if an animal is a carnivore, herbivore or an insectivore. The students got to see 7 different skulls and tried to guess the animal and also what type of eater it was. As always there was a puppet show and the students loved it!

 Have a great weekend,
Nancy and Taylor