Happy New Year! Don't forget Seesaw!

I hope everyone had a nice holiday season.  I am writing to update you on the many exciting learning initiatives going on in our classroom!

In language arts we began our core book Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.  We are using the powerful learning tool Seesaw to document and share our learning about this book.  I hope you will take the time to set up Seesaw if you have not already done so. Once you are set up you will receive notifications when your child posts work to their digital journal. I have added a tab on the front page of this blog with a slide presentation on Seesaw.  Before the holiday break we created multimedia presentations about family traditions and recorded book reviews of Gossamer by Lois Lowry. Both published projects can be found in Seesaw. In writing, we have also been focusing on revision strategies and free writing.  The children have been revisiting older pieces of writing and color coding their digital writing to note changes in sentence structure, verbs, beginnings, and endings.  We are also beginning the study of persuasive writing and using a mentor text, Martha's Letter as our guide.  In this unit we will be identifying the key features of a good piece of persuasive writing and applying what we learn to our own writing.

In Math we completed our study of advanced division of whole numbers and are now learning how to divide decimals.  A strong understanding of place value as well as good recall of number facts are important requirements for being successful in this work.

As part of our continuing study of Earth's Place in the Universe, before the winter break, we enjoyed a class in the Burlington StarLab with Mr. Musselman as our guide.  The StarLab is equipped with enhanced software since its last tour of duty! This allowed us to view, using a protractor overlay on the sky, the sun's angle in the sky during different seasons of the year.  In science class we also used the Star Chart app to simulate a stargazing experience and to help us to make observations of the patterns we see in the sky throughout the course of the year.  We wrote down our observations in our digital science notebooks. We also created birthday bracelets based on the number of hours of light and darkness that occurred on the day we were each born.  Using the bracelets we studied the patterns of daylight vs. darkness that take place over the course of a year.  We currently constructed sundials to help us understand the sun's apparent motion in the sky over the course of a day.