October 17th

Hi parents,

I hope everyone had a good week. We did!  We have concluded our introduction to colonization and will be focusing on the first English settlement, Jamestown.  Students will continue to explore the throughlines of conflict, perspective (voice), and resistance.  During this unit, students will understand: how and why the Jamestown colonists were ill prepared, how the colonists' diverse backgrounds impacted the colony, and how and why the beginnings of slavery occurred in Jamestown (hint: think tobacco).  To develop the students' understanding, we will engage in mini-projects and activities, which allow students to step into the shoes of a colonist and have a first-hand understanding of why this colony nearly failed.  We work with primary documents and well-researched accounts of Jamestown and the Native Americans that populated the area during this time.  Students will continue learning the process of two-column note-taking.  This is an excellent organizational too, and based on our curriculum design, the FA teachers were inspired, and are using it in their classrooms as well.

In Mathematics, we have begun a unit on Number Theory.  Students are learning about factors, prime and composite numbers, square numbers, exponents, and more!  After learning our doubles facts, students have a new set of triangle facts to study.  These are numbers one less or one more than doubles. They will use the double facts they now know as anchor facts to help make sense of our new facts.  We continue to build our mathematical vocabulary as well.

In Language Arts, student have learned about paragraphs being about one key idea.  We practiced writing in paragraphs in our reader's notebooks.  In these notebooks, students and I write letters back and forth to one another about their reading.  This helps give me a window into their reading comprehension and to see how they are implementing the reading strategies we are learning.  Students must edit their writing for FYT and OG skills we've done in class.

In our Mix It Up groups, students paired up with integrated partners to create PowerPoint presentation about an assigned number.  They are trying to represent their number in as many mathematical ways as possible.  We will share these presentations in our Mix It Up groups and later as a whole grade.  The students are enjoying this project a lot and it's cool to see their out of the box thinking!  We can load some to the blog for you to see when we're finished!

Lastly, congratulations to Nathan and Megan who worked so hard on the Bicentennial play.  It was a smashing success!

Best wishes,
Laura