UPDATE

Families, below is an update of our current learning and focus through Winter Break.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

Social Studies:  Announcing the POTLATCH celebration on Dec 12!  Look in your Friday Folders to see how you can help out planning this event to celebrate our Native American learning.   Experts will be completing their NA museum exhibits next week and we will present our learning the following week.  The final week of social studies before winter break will be an introduction to the Age of Exploration.

Science:  Classroom scientists have produced our science focus for the year: How does litter affect the diversity of stream organisms?  Student interests also included ideas about transportation, sound, and design and we will work these ideas into our community project.  Right now and through December, we are focusing on 3 experiments to support our learning and research some topics connected to our focus.  This week we are constructing boats and researching why things float.  After Thanksgiving, we will have an experiment on properties of water and a third focusing on litter.  Students are practicing their application or experimental design.  As they plan these experiments in groups and then pairs, they are preparing to perform one experiment on their own as an assessment of experimental design.  This won't take place until after Winter Break.

Writing: All of our writing efforts are focused on completing and revising our drafts for our NA museum exhibits.  We are using specific lessons on nonfiction writing, especially organization, background knowledge, and nonfiction features to support our communication about our important NA topics.  After Thanksgiving, I will introduce a word study routine so students can also focus on spelling patterns.

Reading: All student chose a "just right" book this week and we looked at ways to continue picking just right books when we finish this one!  Our reading focus right now is about making connections to your book.  We also started our Book Share sharing routine today.  Each Friday, we will share some Book Shares with the class. I included a link below to help kids make good book choices.  We also downloaded the Overdrive App so students can check out eBooks from the DBRL public library.

Reading Link to quality literature at DBRL:

http://kids.dbrl.org/booklists/ 

Math: Our focus in math right bow is dividing by 2 digit divisors.  Students are working hard on dividing with larger numbers.  This unit will be assessed the Tuesday after Thanksgiving Break,  We will then focus on multiplying and dividing decimals until Winter Break.