10/7/25

Language Arts

We are continuing our first module of study, “The Power of Reading," where our guiding questions are:

Why do people read?
How can people get access to the books they want?
What barriers to book access might people experience?

We've been distinguishing between literal and figurative language, finding the theme of stories, and are now beginning to write a narrative piece collaboratively.

Read more about the Module in English or Spanish.

See an overview of our lessons and suggested homework (spoiler alert! It's reading!) in English or Spanish.

Science/Social Studies

We are completing our unit about animal adaptations, natural vs. artificial selection, traits, and survival. Next week, we'll compare and contrast the life cycles of both animals and plants. Kids will get to explore how an understanding of life cycles can aid in solving problems that occur when there are too many or too few organisms in a particular environment. Both of these units will aid in our field trip to Miwok Meadows at the end of the month.

We have a classroom economy where kids earn points for doing their jobs, completing extra work, or being a Brookside PROUD student, then use those points to pay rent on their chairs/table spots. They also choose to spend points on a variety of rewards.

Social-Emotional

We've been doing a lot of talking and practicing around expectations and respect. Especially with the advance to the upper grades and big buddies, the kids have had a lot of opportunities to move up to these bigger expectations.

We started talking about growth mindset in class in August and are continuing this work. We learned that "yet" is a really powerful word and that working on challenging things is one of the best ways to grow our brains. We're working hard to use phrases such as, "I understand what we're doing," and "This makes sense to me," instead of saying ,"This is easy," is "This is too hard."

As a way to learn and share different responsibilities, we are in the process of learning different roles for table members. So far, only the team captain role has been introduced.

The team captain gets materials, returns materials, is who gets extra directions to relay to their group, and is the only representative who may get up to ask questions.

The skeptic questions everything! They ask kids to justify answers.

Math

We are really moving in our introduction to multiplication unit (Versión en español). The kids are getting really comfortable with equal groupings and doubling to solve multiplication story problems. We'll be moving into using strategies to solve multiplication facts and finding patterns amongst multiplication facts. Doubling will be one of the most helpful strategies.

Kids do NOT need to memorize multiplication facts. They should understand the patterns and strategies behind the facts. As we continue to use these strategies, students will begin to increase their automaticity with the facts.

Automaticity is not always synonymous with memorization. Some students will memorize facts, while some may struggle with rote memorization. Having the strategies allows all students to build their number sense to be able to call upon at all times.

A great comparison is that teaching students these building blocks is like teaching them phonics during reading. They need the building blocks to put it all together. So you can think of these strategies as their math "phonics."

The order that we'll talk about all multiplication facts are as follows:

x0
x1
x2
x4
x8
x3
x10
x9
x5
x6
*Note that x7 facts are expressly introduced. After all of the other strategies, only 7x7 remains, so kids will talk about different strategies that they could us. Many use 7x5 and 7x2 facts to solve.

See below for the strategies that we use with examples to help explain them.

Multiplication Fact Strategies

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