Rock star students!

We had another productive week. Our kids were so excited about our fun run! Each day we learned about how to be a good friend and show positive character. Students exercised and celebrated their fundraising efforts. Thursday was the big day! Our kiddos had a blast running for 35 laps!! WOW! I am so proud of our children. They are awesome!

We started unit 5 in math this week. Students are learning about extending multiplication facts. They are practicing their skills while playing multiplication wrestling. Keep practicing those facts. We are also working towards developing our problem solving skills through extended response. Last week we had a very tough problem with seemingly multiple solutions. This led to a fantastic conversation about how to work through problems like this. Our students are amazing, picking up on the every slight nuance in the problem. "It is a race Mrs. Fisher, she would want the best time." Yes! Fantastic! I sent home a copy of our solution. What a wonderful challenge. 

In social studies we are learning about famous explorers while learning about informational text summarizing. 

We continue to learn about scientific method in science. Students ask questions and perform experiments to find answers. The key concepts are testing one variable at a time, and controlling unforeseen variables through careful measurement. Documentation and observation is also extremely important. Students should understand to use their senses to observe and thoroughly document their experiments at home. We will continue to hone our skills at school to enhance their knowledge for their Extreme Science Project. 

We read a biography this week in reading about Gloria Estefan. I even dusted off an old Miami Sound Machine track for the kids to listen to. In the process we learned to pick out the key ideas and make judgements about them based on evidence from the text. In addition students learned about object pronouns. 

Our students are really taking our goal of increasing our vocabulary seriously. Many students are not only studying the meanings of WTW list words but are also finding meanings of unknown words in books. 

Kids are building gaining knowledge about word roots and affixes everyday and applying that knowledge during our word work sessions

We just took our pre-assessment for persuasive writing and will begin that unit next week. 

Have a wonderful weekend and enjoy the quality time with your families over this Thanksgiving holiday.