Week of December 13th

Although the week wasn't quite as fun as our previous week at Lorado Taft, we did accomplish a lot and get through a bunch of curriculum. We continued our look at primary resources in Social Studies and completed a project that takes a close look at an old picture of one or multiple cars and then we study it and discuss what we learn from it. We identified some observations and asked questions that the picture raised. We also tried to view the picture through one of the social studies lenses. The results of this project are hanging outside our room should you be in the hallways at some point over the next several weeks. We also watched an old black and white silent film about the beginning of the automobile age; the comments from the kids were just priceless as they watched this sometimes grainy, sometimes humorous documentary from the Department of Agriculture. This was just the first of numerous videos I will be showing to help the kids gain a better understanding of the overall impact on lives of the automobile.

As we continue our study of non-fiction, we looked at some of the challenges of reading and understanding non-fiction. We talked about clues that the text provides, such as: titles, headings, sub-headings, pictures, captions, and the table of contents. We discussed how to 'look in (root word, prefix, suffix) and around (context clues)' a word for clues to understand difficult vocabulary. We also continued our discussion of main idea and supporting details. This is important when it comes to being able to summarize an article, document, or passage of a book. It also helps tremendously with our opinion writing as we can look at our thesis as the main idea and then support it with multiple reasons written in paragraph form. We talked about the importance and relevance of adding personal stories to our supporting paragraphs to make them personal and to help strengthen our opinions and began to add them to our writing.

I imagine you potentially saw some frustration and challenges with a protractor this week. We began our new math switch unit and focused on how to measure and draw angles with this tool. It can be extremely frustrating for some of the kids as this tool is not at all easy to get the hang of using properly. We will continue practicing with it this week and will give the kids a unit test on Thursday. After break, we will stay in our same math groups to study area and perimeter.

A couple of special things we did this week were our Hour of Code in technology, creating quilt squares for our new sister school in the Pilsen neighborhood of the city, and completing the Five Essentials survey for the State of Illinois. As the excitement level grew throughout the week, I found myself reminding the kids at the end of Friday that we do have one more week of school before winter break. We will have our party on Friday afternoon, giving all of us a nice little push into two weeks of family time, vacation, and no school :-)