4th and 5th Grade Newsroom

In Newsroom this year, we started with a story telling unit. We are working on public speaking and presentation skills. The students are working to learn a story using effective performance skills. They will be telling their stories to younger students the week before winter break. Please be sure you child is practicing their story each night at home.

Once we return in January, we will begin working to develop the students’ reading, writing, speaking, and research skills through a Power of Persuasion (POP) unit. We will be focusing on the following understandings:

· There are multiple viewpoints, often based on experience.

· They need to gather reliable information to make informed decisions

· Language is powerful and the power of a message is influenced by how it is presented.

· Positions to an argument can change over time

· They can express their opinion with conviction, evidence and reasoning and respect the same in others.

Some examples of skills in which we will be working are effective listening, differentiating between fact and opinion, evaluating cause and effect, organizing and prioritizing an argument, and proper presentation skills. This unit will culminate in a District-Wide Power of Persuasion Celebration. This exciting event will be held at a Middle School (to be announced) the evening of April 25.

4th and 5th Grade Studio

In Studio, we started our year working on a unit participating in activities from the Destination Imagination program. The goal of this program is to teach creative and critical thinking, presentation skills, problem solving, and teamwork skills. We started the unit by learning the 4 principles of creative thinking: Fluency, Flexibility, Originality and Elaboration. Students are learning to create groups of items for better fluency, to look at things in a different way for flexibility, to go beyond their first thought and find more unexpected and creative ideas for originality, and build on these ideas to fill in the details with elaboration. This unit is creative problem-solving at its best!! Students have been working in teams and have been given scenarios of which to present or to create something within a small time limit. I hope they are finding this unit highly motivating, very fun, and extremely challenging.

2 of the classes are working on "The Snowman Construction Company". Their construction firm has been asked to create a "unique" snowman that people can buy. It may cost no more than $25 nor weigh more than 50 lbs (prices and weights are given). They will be presenting their snowman before winter break.

In January, we will be starting our chess unit. This will be a great learning experience for these students.

Welcome to our 2010-2011 School year!!

Hello everyone!!

We are off to a great start! I want to let you know a little bit about the start up for enrichment. I begin the year by going into all of the classrooms and doing a "Push-in" lesson. This is a lesson through teacher invitation where I can introduce myself to the students and give them a fun challenge outside of the regular curriculum. These will start next week and will take about 3 weeks to complete. On 9/29 I will go on the Beauty of Bronze field trip with the Washington 5th graders and on 10/1 I will attend the same field trip with the Lewis and Clark 5th graders.

Late September, early October we will work on identifying students for enrichment pull-out classes. 4th and 5th graders will be identified through the MAPS testing in Reading and Math (this was taken last year and some schools may choose to take it again this fall). We also use the CogAt test results from 3rd grade to place this year 4th graders into Studio classes.

3rd grade teachers will also be using the MAPS tests (which they will take in the next few weeks) to help place students in enrichment for this year, but the students won't be officially identified until their 4th grade year.

K-2 students are placed in enrichment based on teacher nomination. We do have forms for teachers to use for the nomination process. Most students attending enrichment are working well above grade level as shown through some type of district or teacher assessment.

The identification process takes several weeks- students need to take assessments and the data needs to be collected and reviewed. This is why we do not start pulling students for enrichment until the first week of October.

If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to call me at school or check out the enrichment link on the WSD website. I am looking forward to a great year!!!

WA 3rd Grade Literacy

This week we started with our analogy worksheets (similarities at this point) and then once again looked at the organization of a Pourquoi story and started breaking it down into a story frame. One more story to go, then we are going to talk about $100 words and similes so they can include them in their own story. Hopefully before break they will begin to organize their own Pourquoi story to write.

3rd Grade Math

This week at Washington students continued to work on the "Draw a Picture" strategy for problem solving. One problem we encountered was that several of the students were in such a hurry to get the problems finished, they rushed through the problems and didn't get the correct answer. So, we are going to work on taking our time, drawing a neat and accurate picture and getting the correct answer.

At Lewis and Clark, we started the new strategy "Guess and Check". The students really liked the idea of making an educated guess based on the information given, checking their answer, and using the wrong answer to help them move closer to the right one. They found the problems quite challenging, which of course, most students who are high in math love to try and solve.

This is a fun unit and the students are really going to grow a lot this year. Many of these problem solving strategies will come in handy for the Math is Cool tournaments that begin in the 4th grade. I hope all of these students will be on the 4th grade team!

2nd Grade Literacy

This week at both schools we read a new story titled "Arab Sang and the Cranes". I will meet with Lewis and Clark students next Friday to have our discussion- be sure to read the story once more at home and answer the questions. At Washington, since we don't have school on Wednesday, they have an extra week to get their assignment completed.

1st grade

This week at L & C we finished publishing our first poem. Next week we will start a new one. At WA, the students are all ready to start publishing, but will have to wait 2 weeks because I won't see them next week due to Veteran's Day.