Hi parents!

We’re back from Christmas break and already into our new novel study. As noted in my email earlier this week, we are reading The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. So far we have enjoyed reading the background of the main character, William Kamkwamba. It has been interesting to see how easily we are able to relate to this boy who grew up 30 years ago in Malawi. On Wednesday we created Venn diagrams to compare our lives to William’s. We filled the intersection with things like games we play with our friends and treats we enjoy like bubble gum. As we continue to read, we will be taking apart various electronics and playing Mancala just like William! Thank you for those of you who were able to donate any electronics for us to tinker with 🙂 We will likely begin this project on Tuesday of this week so if you have any old VCRs, radios, etc. that you’d like to get out of your house, there is still time to send them in! 

On Monday we finally came to the conclusion of our 60/61 debate!! We decided that there are 60.9 cm in 24 inches. We used what we knew about the relationship between millimeters and centimeters to help come to this conclusion. Even students who are convinced the Google has the more accurate answer of 60.96 cm in 24 inches were trying to prove this answer through algebraic equations and various grouping strategies. It can be frustrating as a class to feel like we won’t be able to come to a solution, but we are practicing the important skills needed to persevere through challenges and are also practicing various computational skills along the way.

DynaMath has been another great way to introduce new math concepts. Although we are still determining the best way to review as a whole class, I think we can all agree that the conversations happening while the class works through each magazine are beyond valuable! Take a look at the video clip below to see a little bit of the problem solving and cooperative skills being put to work!

 

Going forward, we will continue to use DynaMath to introduce new challenges as well as open middle math problems. Ask your child what an open middle math problem is! Then feel free to check out the website yourself 😉 www.openmiddle.com. Each student this year also has a Matific login. Feel free to use this during your student’s screen time at home! We will specifically encourage using the site a bit later in the school year as we participate in the site’s competition. More details to come. For now please note that your accounts will be billed $10 for the Matific account. Although the logins went home while I was on maternity leave, I’ll be sending them home again. Feel free to reach out with any questions.

This may sound like a week packed with academic activities (and it was!!) but we always make time to build our classroom community through structured play (ask your kids to teach you Bippity Bop Bop!), unstructured choice time, and general silliness.

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend! I’m looking forward to another week of fun 🙂

-Ms. Anna