Friday 1/12/18

Here are a few highlights from the past week:

In Reading Workshop, all students are enjoying their independent reading books. Students did some last prep work for sharing book projects and they are finally done! All shared, assessed, and reflected on.
For Outdoor Learning on Wednesday, we did some snowball throwing. We created targets outside and students threw snowballs with a partner. All throws were recorded and accuracy percentages are being calculated in math. When we finished with that, we had extra time and went to adopted trees to observe changes.
On Tuesday, students had their first Little Buddy time with K/1ers in Mrs. C's class. All 5/6ers read aloud to their Little Buddies from books they picked out, then did some drawing with them about the book.
In Math, we continued small group rotation work. Right now, we have 3 groups- two 5th grade groups and one 6th grade group. All groups rotate between a small group lesson with me, independent work, and math games or other work with Mr. K (our paraeducator). Our units right now:
We continued Word Study this week. There are currently 3 groups. Every 7-9 days students will get a new list of words that focus on a spelling pattern. They have word study time most days which may include: sorting words, word searches, lessons with me, partner word sorting, games on Spelling City, searching for words that follow the current pattern in their own writing and their books, and more. We will be building in vocabulary in the future.
In Science, all students are almost ready to begin their controlled experiments. They have a testable question, a hypothesis, a materials list, and the beginnings of their procedure.
All students are continuing their weekly independent typing instruction, using typing.com. This involves lessons and games to help strengthen typing skills.
Green Sheets were done, but since I was out on Friday, they will come home after the weekend.

Some upcoming dates, important notes, and things to look forward to in the coming weeks:

Monday 1/15/18- No School
Thursday 1/18/18 and 1/25/18- XC Skiing at Craftsbury Outdoor Center. 845am-12pm.
Tuesday 1/23/18- Celebration of Learning (530pm) and Arts Showcase and Concert (615pm)
Thursday 2/1/18- Early Release Day- Staff Professional Development. Dismissal at 1150am.
Friday 2/2/18- No School- Staff Professional Development.
*** Cold weather has arrived!!! Please be sure kids are coming with warm gear for recess and other outdoor time! This time of year they should have boots, a coat, snow pants, a hat, and warm/waterproof gloves or mittens. ***
In Reading Workshop, students will continue independent reading. We will also look at last trimester's reading goals, their progress, and start monitoring their progress for the genre challenge.
Also in Reading, we will begin our mini-unit on the book Brown Girl Dreaming by Jaqueline Woodson, which was the Vermont Humanities Council choice for Vermont Reads 2017. You can read more about it here https://www.vermonthumanities.org/vermont-reads/vermont-reads-2017. This mini-unit will be in partnership with Brett at the Community Library. She will be involved with reading and discussion of the book as well as helping us plan a community book discussion sometime in February. I will be reading aloud a good portion of the book, but will also ask that students do some reading on their own and in partners.
We will continue with math rotations in small groups.
We will spend time finishing up the loose ends of planning and researching controlled experiments then begin them!
We will NOT have Outdoor Learning this week, as we will be XC Skiing at Craftsbury Outdoor Center on Thursday morning.
In Writing Workshop we will continue with Personal Narratives. Starting this coming week, everyone will choose one story to bring to final draft form.
We will continue Word Study work.
We will be doing prep work for the Celebration of Learning on Tuesday, January 23rd at 530pm (before the concert). We will make some decisions about what we want to share and how we want it to look!
We will continue to use the Smarties activity to help us do some goal setting work for the year both in reading and other areas.