October 2020

 Greetings A-3's 

Welcome to my monthly BLOG.  This is where I will give updates on curriculum, Amaral musings and share photos.  (Weekly emails will offer more detail oriented information.)

We are finally in a more settled state and things are running smoothly with our routines.  The kids are proving to be resilient with the situation, masks and all.  Even in the circumstance of having to move spaces, they continue to push through with positive attitudes and growth mindsets.  I am so very proud of each and every one of them! We are a great team!

In our current math unit, we are delving into building a deeper understanding of place value and how it helps us in our daily math operations.  They have been working with different methods to add and subtract large numbers (open number line, adding by place and use of base 10 blocks).  Later in the year we will learn the traditional algorithm for addition (the subtraction one is taught in 4th grade), but for now our focus is on building flexibility with our math processes.  Math flexibility strengthens number sense and deepens the understanding of operations. Our next unit, just around the corner, will be multiplication. 

We continue to work on our reading unit Building a Reading Life.  Recently we have been focusing on building comprehension skills.  We have been learning to give ourselves comprehension checks - to think about what our mind is doing while we read.  For example sometimes the author writes in a way that makes a movie in our mind, while other times we are receiving new information. Strong readers pay attention to this so we can build connections of content and context.  More recently we have been honing our prediction skills.  When we can predict what will happen, as well as how it might happen, while connecting our prediction to what we have already read, we strengthen our comprehension.  Encouraging this type of conversation around the books your child/family reads helps to build these skills.

In writing we have been generating lots of true stories from our own lives.  We have built a strong repertoire of strategies to build a foundation of ideas to choose from for future narrative writings.  Using strategies like thinking of special people, places, items.  Using strong emotions and memories.  Each student has added more than 10-entries to their Seed Journal.  Our next steps will take us into choosing one idea to develop into a longer piece of written work.  

Social Studies started out with a focus on building our growth mindset and classroom community.  This will be continuous and pervasive through the year.  More recently we have shifted to learn about our Fundamental Needs.  This helps to build the foundation for our upcoming study of the Native Americans.  Very soon we will be connecting human needs to environment and then study how the land has changed over time.  In every unit of history we study, we will relate back to these needs. 

Our Science explorations of Water have been a highlight of every week.  We are currently experimenting with the properties of water.  We experimented with water drops on different surfaces to see how water interacts with different materials, then we learned about cohesion and surface tension.  We watched this video as a conclusion to our experiment, it offers lots of fun and simple ideas for home experiments.  

I hope this snapshot of where we are in our curriculum is helpful.  Please feel free to reach out with any questions, clarifications or concerns.  Please enjoy the pictures below.