Learning Updates

Dear Families,

Thanks for a great 2010. I look forward to all the work ahead with your students and you in 2011.

We've had a very busy final week of school before the break. Here are a few highlights:

Science/Social Studies

• We finished our studies of the different types of water erosion
• Students took two separate land & water assessments
• Began studying Lewis & Clark, within the context of exploration
• Steve Taylor made an entertaining, humorous, and educational presentation about Lewis & Clark. Thank you for your support in making this enrichment activity possible!

Steve Taylor's Lewis & Clark presentation involved talking puppets, magic, jokes, and audience participation!

 Math

• Learned a new algorithm (partial products) that is helpful conceptually in developing your child's understanding of the place value that occurs in multiplication
• Combines our work lately with a game called multiplication wrestling with extended multiplication facts, and estimating with large numbers--ask your child to explain these three things and how they connect in the partial products algorithm
• Will learn lattice algorithm for multiplication method Friday--this one is a favorite of students!

Writing

• Students typed their clean copies & brought to school on USB stick or emailed them
• I scanned their images in, & students imported/compressed them in MS Word
• They saved the files as PDFs for our blog
• We had an Author Chair Celebration--see separate post below!

Reading

• Read Leah's Pony--a story about the dust bowl of the 1930s. Ask your student how the story connected with our land/water studies
• Read about exploration broadly, and then more specifically with regard to Lewis & Clark, and exploration of Washington State
• Mrs. Lederman read a story to our class
• Started Mountain Language word work program
• Read Aloud--Where the Red Fern Grows--we made some more progress. Ask your student what Billy's great challenge has been lately. How does the author stretch small moments? 

Choir Concert. Choir students performed some great jazz numbers on Thursday!