First, I would like to wish you all a Happy Holidays. Enjoy time with family and find time to relax during this holiday break! What a surprise the snow day was on Tuesday! It did throw a bit of a wrench in my plans to bring closure to projects and units before break, but we are rolling with it. Here are quick notes related to language arts/creativity groups: The second round of third grade language arts time wrapped up today with a literature circle based on the book When Marian Sang based on the real life of Marian Anderson, a famous opera singer who fought against segregation to achieve her dream. This was a practice for third graders to understand the different jobs for literature circles so that in February we are ready to read a full novel and lead discussions in small groups. Fourth grade will pick back up with language arts time with me after the holiday break. Remind your fourth grader that they have projects based on Bud, Not Buddy that are due on January 4 when we are back together. Fifth graders literally did wrap up our latest unit on poetry today. I hope you will be pleased Christmas morning when you get your first glimpse of a little secret we have been working on for the last few weeks. There are some amazingly creative kids in that group. Below you can see some pictures of Santa's Workshop today during our "wrap up!" One thing I would request of you over Christmas break is to please work with your child - 3rd, 4th, and 5h graders - on their basic facts. We are using XtraMath.org this year to practice basic facts and many of the students are still trying to pass their addition facts. They must pass addition to get to subtraction and then multiplication. I would love for them to be done with addition and subtraction. If you could have them login to their account even 3-4 times during break, that would be awesome. Each time they login, it only takes about 5-10 minutes to run through a session. The kids know how to login from their computers (and they SHOULD know their four-digit login.) I have also sent them with a flyer reminding them. This flyer also has information for how you can sign up to get updates on their progress. Any help with this would be wonderful! Check out XtraMath at https://xtramath.org/#/home/index Please feel free to check out the Web Resources portion of the GT website too for other useful links for keeping math skills up during the two-week break. These are games that can be fun as well as educational if you don't mind your child having some extra screen time. The third grade page has some great games for working on basic multiplication fact mastery. http://traceybean.weebly.com/web-resources.html Lastly this week, I have a request. I mentioned that I have been approved for a grant for engineering projects for the spring semester. Some of these projects require some recycled materials that I would love some help collecting. If you have any of these materials in your recycle box, can you begin to gather them for me to add to my collection? We will be needing: * empty plastic water bottles * cardboard (cut into 2X8 strips, 2X4 strips, 8X8 squares, 4X5 rectangles) * paper towel tubes or wrapping paper tubes
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Quick note on Math Olympiad for next week, due to the choir field trip, I have moved the Math Olympiad contest to Wednesday for both 4th and 5th graders. We will participate in contest #2 during our math times on December 16. Please try to make sure your child is at school as they cannot make this contest up when they return to school. 5th grade will also check in on their Stock Market portfolios on that day. As many of you know, I had the opportunity to attend NASA Space Camp for Educator’s thanks to Honeywell last summer. I had so many great ideas for bringing back STEM learning to my classroom. But new ideas usually need a little “seed money” to get them rolling when you work with around 60 students. I applied for and have gotten word that I have received $400 from a grant from Toshiba, who was looking for STEM learning opportunities to invest in this school year. I am so excited that next semester each of my math classes will be doing monthly engineering projects (mostly space related) to learn about collaboration, designing, testing, and redesigning using their creative and mathematical skills. I can’t wait to kick this off. A group of Fossil High School students were also looking for a service project to share their passion for STEM fields so they will also be coming to help. If there are any of you that would want to volunteer time to help or you also have a passion for engineering and the design process, please let me know as I can always use more hands. We will use one Thursday/Friday each month during our regular scheduled math time to do these projects. More info to come… Probably the most fun the kids had all week in my math classes was to participate in the Hour of Code. This is a nationwide movement to get computer programming taught in public schools to all students at all levels for at minimum one hour each school year so that kids can see it isn't too hard and everyone is capable of coding. The kids were able to choose some basic block-programming games to play and learn from. These websites can be found on the Web Resources link on the GT website. They are open sites year round so that your child can get on and learn/play all year (consider this when they are bored over Christmas break!) I have put the links to a couple of the kids’ favorites here in case you too want to try your hand at coding! Also below is a quick video introducing the Hour of Code. Star Wars https://code.org/starwars Minecraft https://code.org/mc Frozen https://studio.code.org/s/frozen Hopefully you enjoyed a fabulous Thanksgiving feast at your house, and are now enjoying the December holiday season. Let me catch you up on the last couple of weeks in Knowledge Peak classes (since I was too sleepy after my turkey dinner last Thursday to blog!) Quick update on each class and what we are studying for the month of December: 5th grade math – Test over graphing and data collection this week and moving on to a brief unit on setting up and solving algebra equations 5th language arts/creativity – Working on a poetry unit (both writing and reading) 4th math – Finishing our decimal and measurement unit and beginning our long multiplication/division study 4th language arts/creativity – Break for the month of December, but don’t forget to be working on Bud, Not Buddy projects 3rd math – Completing a unit on basic multiplication and division and will be starting a unit on place value including decimals 3rd language arts/creativity – Shared The Green Book projects and learning about literature circles roles and modeling good discussion for literature circles As I mentioned 3rd grade language arts/creativity students spent this week presenting their book projects from our study of The Green Book. This story is a dystopian book about a father and his three kids that are a part of colonizing a new planet Shine after having to leave Earth. The students did an AMAZING on their projects. They were so creative! Some chose to continue the story of the people of Shine including elements like adding new alien characters, finding new creatures, facing new challenges, and even the death of a main character cliffhanger! Other students took time to put their visualization skills on paper or models. They created maps (complete with legends,) clay models, and structures to showcase what they saw in their minds for the layout of this new world. Still other students used their powers of invention to create something that the people of Shine could use to make their lives better like wheat harvesting machines. A couple of the girls used their artistic abilities to show us a picture of what life on Shine might look like a year after the book ends. Seriously amazing work! Here are some examples (and more are on the photos page.) Keeping on the 3rd grade theme, before we left for Thanksgiving break, the third grade teaching team and I organized a fun end to our measurement unit. The Second-Annual Measurement Olympics were held and medals were awarded for estimation and measuring skills. Students were put into groups with teachers, and our AWESOME group of parent volunteers manned the stations to help kids test their skills. Events included the cotton ball shotput, the straw-javelin throw, the paper plate discus throw, and many more. Again there are pictures below of my team competing (and more pictures from my team’s events on the photos page.) |
Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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