Team Hyper Space: November 18-22

    Wow, is time flying? We can't believe that Thanksgiving is next week already! We have been working hard this week on our Native American and Explorers charts. This has been a struggle for some in time management and working together. Some groups flew through the task and really worked together while others struggled a bit. We tried to come around and help some of the struggling groups with some strategies. Some were double doing the work and needed some guidance. We are so thankful for some great students and instructional assistance who have helped through this process as well. We hope that the students are learning how to work on a task like this together.
     As we start the next step in our project students will be focusing in on one group or person. They will be learning a lot more about this group or person and they will be sharing this with their classmates and with our first grade friends in a few weeks. We are very excited to work with Mrs. Allie Holland for the next few weeks to create a very cool virtual museum. Stay tuned for more details!
   Our first round of Explorations was this past week and students were able to go to other parts of the school and learn to do something different. It sounded like they had a great time and met some new people and played some fun games and learned so really neat things.
     In math, we are still working with fractions and this week we multiplied and divided them. We learned what the reciprocal was and what it meant to invert and multiply (or as we say it ... Copy, Change, Flip). We will have a common assessment on this on Wednesday. The advanced group took this assessment this past week and will begin working on unit rate. We also, as always, keep working on our facts.
     In language arts, we have been continuing with our trade books and answering questions in class. We continue to work on Achieve 3000 and our writing as well. Students this year will be taking the writing portion of the ISTEP on the computer so we will be moving our journals from paper and pencil to our lap tops and we will be working on encouraging students to work on their typing skills.
     In science, we are finishing up our work with our little lizard friends. We will be having a common assessment over producers, consumers and decomposers soon. The students have really enjoyed these critters. In social studies this week we continued to work on learning more about Native Americans. We also learned about JFK some on Friday with that being the 50th anniversary of his assassination.
     This next week is a shot one and it looks to be a cold one so encourage your child to wear warm clothes as they go outside until it is below 10 degree windchill. Have a great week!

Some Exploration photos