January Update!

Happy 2019 Everyone!

Our New Year kicked off with the beginning of our Bridges program on Thursday, January 3rd.  The Bridges program is outlined in detail in a letter I sent home in late December.  Our first activity was to create Bridge Posters that show what each group of children has in common with their senior volunteer. Below is a picture of our first class.  Students are sharing what they have in common with each other and their senior volunteers.  Bridges occurs once a week for six weeks.  Our second class focused on Schools Then and Now.  Students gave their volunteers tours of the school and volunteers shared stories about what schools were like when they were children.  The children asked many thoughtful questions about what classrooms looked like and if they had technology back then.  This Thursday's class will focus on family traditions.

In math we are learning how to divide by 1 digit numbers.  An important concept is understanding how multiplication and division are related.  Children also need to understand what remainders are and how remainders factor into answers to division word problems.

The fourth grade has begun our Informational Writing Unit on Canada/Mexico.  Over the course of last week and this week each homeroom is being taught four specific research strategies (one by each fourth grade teacher).  After learning the four research strategies children return to their homerooms to complete their research and write their reports on either Canada or Mexico.

In reading we answered an essential question on the book Orphan of Ellis Island using two column notes.  "How does Dominic Cantori change from the beginning of the story?" The children answered this question in three paragraph essays using their two column notes as a guide.

In science we began a unit on Energy.  Our work focuses on understanding the energy story.  How is energy transferred and transformed as it moves from one object to the next? We just had an exciting class discovering how to fill a capacitor with electrical energy and using it to make a propeller spin!