Friday, December 6

This week flew by, even though it was very busy.

In LA, we continue with our book club, research, LA/SS unit on India.  We read our book club books and met in clubs for some very interesting conversation on Wednesday. We will meet one more time, next Wednesday to finish our conversation and begin our group project.

We also learned some note-taking techniques. One is sketch noting, which includes sketching and words. We also learned about underlining and turning notes into pictures (especially maps.) We applied these techniques to an article that we read together and a video we watched together. We will continue with this next week, especially when we start our mini-research projects.

We have just two weeks before our Christmas holiday break.  We will finish our book clubs and projects (See an example here.) We will complete a mini-research project with a partner or small group and create a slide show to present next week.

In math this week we focused primarily on percents and their relationships to fractions and decimals. We are only touching upon decimals as they will be covered in an upcoming unit in the next few months. We studied percent bars and benchmark percents and fractions to help us find numbers. We particularly focused on the importance of percents in the sports world, but will continue to find ways we see percentages in other ways too. This work is continued through our 2-4-2 that was assigned on Monday. Our menu is FULL of opportunities for students to practice different types of math thinking.
We will continue exploring percents next week in preparation for our Bits and Pieces assessment next Friday 12/13. Students will be receiving their study guides for this assessment on Wednesday, at which time they will be labeling what they know confidently in green, what they can do with some help in yellow and what they are very confused about in red. They will be bringing this study guide on THURSDAY 12/12 to study that night for homework. This is a great opportunity to look over what your child has done in math for the past month or so.

Please continue your Moby Max! If your child received a comment regarding needing to finish fact fluency, please have them use their hour of Moby Max time to be completing this. If they have accomplished this, please have them do the lessons that have been assigned to them. Thank you for your support on this!

In science this week we had quite some time in the science lab. This week was the first week we started with split groups and we received some positive feedback from students stating they like the small group labs much better. Yippie! The first lab we did was weatherization of a mountain. We are focusing on how the properties and movements of water shape Earth's surface and affect its systems. We first watched how rain can affect the changing of Earth's surface on mountains, causing erosion, creating bodies of water, and shaping the mountains to look different. We were able to connect these ideas to our recent study of rocks and the creation of sedimentary rocks through this weatherization process. The second lab, that we did today, was our glacier lab. Students did an inquiry task where they created a hypothesis to determine what would happen when glaciers slide down mountainsides. Students were very focused and super into this hands-on lab experience. There were some amazing journal entries and sketches of before and after. We will take these inquiries and ideas and begin to explore them further through videos and the exploration of our very own Lake Champlain starting on Monday. We are planning to have the science assessment on Thursday 12/12. If we are able to get through what we need to, we will continue with this plan. If not, Ms. Roberge will be moving the assessment to Monday, 12/16.

The calendar has been updated with assignments and due dates. Students also received their planners on Tuesday and filled them out for December.

Due next Friday:
Word study
Seesaw entry for your book
article 2
Math MENU
Study Guide for math
Study Guide for science

2-4-2's are due WEDNESDAY 12/18