Hi Families!
Happy Tuesday! I hope your dragonfly is adjusting well to their second week in their new remote classroom. Last week, we took it slow and got to know one another. We practiced taking meaningful breaks, performing learning tasks, posting to Seesaw, and just getting used to a new environment, whether it was having a new teacher, or friends, or both! I understand that remote learning has its challenges and in many cases is not ideal but I would like to kindly express my gratitude toward all of you for being so understanding and flexible as we all adjust to this new way of learning. If you've been with me since September, thank you for being flexible as we slowed things down a bit last week for our new friends to adjust!
This week we have started some new units. We are entering an addition and subtraction strategy unit for math. We've started with decomposing numbers, fact families, and we will be learning some strategies to work through addition and subtraction problems. We will start with visual strategies and then make our way to the traditional methods that you and I grew up learning!
In reading, we are in a tricky word unit. We have talked about some bad habits that we all have done atleast once or twice in our reading! We are going to hold ourselves accountable to fixing these bad habits and replacing them with new ones! By doing this we are going to put some decoding strategies under our belt- starting tomorrow we will be learning some strategies to help us solve words and we will practice how we know when to use each one! On your child's Seesaw you will be able to see them using these strategies!
In writing, we are working on a "small moment" unit. This is writing about one memory and including many details. We started by drawing detailed pictures and doing a touch and tell to help us write and include all the details from that memory. As we've become stronger in the ideas we are writing about, now we are starting to look at our writing as editors. Students will be going back into their writing and holding themselves accountable for editing words that are missing sounds or adding words that may have been left out. Editing is a tricky concept for new writers but as we've worked through this together, the students have shown that rereading their writing and editing is certainly do-able even at their early stage of writing! We've also done some free writing to foster the joy of writing during this time!
In science we have been having science talks and inquiry. We are using questions from kids around the world through the resource of Mystery Doug to guide our own questioning of our world. Science talks allow us to think about the world around us, try to make sense of it, and realize that there is much more research to be done to figure out the amazing world around us. So far as a new classroom family we have looked at the questions of "What is at the bottom of the ocean?", "Why were emoji's created?" and "Where was the first candy invented?". We have come up with our own class wonders as well and will be researching those ideas all together.
Tomorrow at 12:00 if you would like to join myself and Mr. G for a zoom lunch, he will be available to answer tech questions! He can also help you set up the Coding Monsters App that we will be using on Fridays. If you can't join us for this lunch but have questions about technology, please email myself and Mr. G and we would be happy to assist you!
It sounds like our SEL sessions will most likely be held on Thursday afternoons. We are trying to offer transportation for families and I will let you know as soon as we get the approval for this new session of SEL days to begin! Please let me know if you plan on attending these sessions if you haven't done so already!
