If your child is in Knowledge Peak for math, last week you should have received an email from SignUp Genius to consider volunteering for our next Engineering Challenge days coming up in February. On Thursday, February 23, and Friday, February 24, during regular math classes, students will be doing their third STEM day in my class. Please consider coming and helping and joining in on the fun! If you did not get the email, here is the link for signing up: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0c4fa4ae2ea6fd0-stem This week I'll take a bit of your time to share the projects that my two current language arts groups are working on. For the month of January, I have 4th graders for language arts/creativity. We are focusing on reading nonfiction. We kicked off this topic by exploring the types of text structures (compare/contrast, cause/effect, sequential, etc.) of nonfiction books and the text features (pictures with captions, sidebars, index, graphs/maps/charts, etc.) that make nonfiction different than fiction books. Each student has a biography of a famous Colorado history figure. They will be reading their book and creating a list of facts about their person in the form of ABC's. They also have choice in one more project to share what they learned about their person either in writing journal entries as their figure, choosing objects to represent their person, or creating a cartoon of a major event from their life. The documents they are working on as they read are below if you are curious. All of their work for this biography project is due February 1 so please check in with your 4th grader and make sure they are on target to finish by that time. We'll be working all this week in class too. Fifth grade language arts/creativity students are also focusing their work with me on reading nonfiction. Their project is much larger and long-term though. Each student is choosing a topic of their choice to study as part of their Peak Project. They will be writing a five-paragraph essay on their topic and completing a project to share their learning with the class. The objectives with this project are many: learn to manage time for a project & meet deadlines, find resources (books and internet) and learn to take notes and cite sources appropriately, speak in front of the class, become an expert on a topic, and much more. Final essays are due before Spring Break and projects for sharing right after Spring Break. Our focus lately has been on how to choose a topic, narrow it down to the important subtopics and questions for researching. We'll officially start the research next week. Please periodically between now and March 8, check in with your child to see how their project is going. Below are some of the important documents that students will be using to help guide their work:
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May 2018
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