1. The Family Fun-Fest and Bazaar!Come to St. Edward's Church Hall tomorrow from 9am-8pm. Santa will be visiting for breakfast and Fr. Mark will be serving his famous soup at our chicken parm dinner. Come down on Sunday from 10am-1pm, too! I'll be there on Saturday after 2. See you there! 2. December Newsletter & Advent Service ProjectVersions are available for download Newsletters 3. Math and Science ReviewWe worked in groups this week several times to review for our Math and upcoming Science tests. Math games really help with the review process because they are fun and often are self-checking, which give students immediate feedback about their progress. 4. Advent is Here!Our Church is now in the season of Advent- a time of waiting and preparing our hearts for Jesus' birth. It is also a reminder that Jesus is welcome into our hearts year round, and that we must always work to welcome Him in. The Jesse Tree is a way of tracing Jesus' lineage and recognizing our models of faith in the Old Testament. We created ornaments that reflected symbols for many of these heroes of our faith. 5. ListenwiseOur reading choice time this week featured the website www.listenwise.com. This website currates podcasts from news outlets around the country and matches them with content in Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies. This is a great way to build background knowledge on many topics as well as current events. It does double duty in developing critical listening skills, too!
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Did you get Mrs. Pro's email today? Check your inbox and spam folders. If you didn't get it, send an email to the office or to me with your updated address so that you can be on our contact list! Thanksgiving Food DriveThank you to those who have participated in our Thanksgiving food drive. If you haven't done so yet, please send in canned goods. Our local families in need are very grateful! We will be blessing the baskets at Mass on Monday at 1pm. Please join us! Aesop's FablesThanks to your support of our Walk-a-thon and other fundraisers, we invited performers in to share a performance of Aesop's fables using puppets. The show was a great way to learn these timeless stories. Ask your children about the lessons that they have learned from the performances AND about the fable that they are writing. Mrs. Carter is back!Welcome back to Mrs. Carter, our school's writing coach. Her lessons with the children help to support the work that we do in Language class. She will be teaching the children about the 6 traits that all good writing pieces have and help the children to develop these in their work. Cha-cha-changes...We have begun learning about physical and chemical changes in Science. If your child asks for baking soda and vinegar, he or she is replicating the experiment that we did in science today- a demonstration of the chemical change that happens when the two combine. We'll be studying this further in the coming weeks. Indoor Recess FunBad or very cold weather means that we have indoor recess, which isn't always a bad thing :) Students this week showed their creative flair with these pattern block designs. A lot of thought, planning, and trial-and-error went into these designs. Nice work!
There have been so many things going on lately. Here's a peak at what we've been up to! Halloween ParadeScience ExperimentsWhat's the best way to learn about volume? By measuring! If you were wondering why your child was asking for an empty box, we used them to practice metric measurements and to practice using a formula for calculating volume. Using the volume formula allowed us to dip our toe in the pre-algebra pool, and it look's like we are ready! We also experimented with mystery liquids to introduce the concept of density. We'll be building on this next Monday. Writing and GrammarWe've learned how to use the website www.noredink.com to practice grammar concepts and get immediate feedback on our strengths and weaknesses. Students loved that the sentences use their names and the things that they are interested in. Funny sentences always make it more fun! We've also been doing some pre-writing for our Survival Guide nonfiction writing unit. We loved the three minute timed writing! The time crunch really made us think and focus on our topics! We then got peer feedback to help us pick a topic that would be the best to write and focus on for our drafts.
1. Kindness ChallengeOur academic subjects are very important, but growing into good people is also one of the things that is important to us here at WCRS. To help recognize the many ways we can be kind to each other, our class has a "Kindness Challenge", a place for the members of our room to let us know when they see kindness in action. Here's what that board looks like. Ask your child about the many kind things that we do for one another here in school. 2. Decimal Cha-cha SlideI'll admit it- I have zero dance moves, BUT our current math topic, dividing decimals by decimals, can be a tricky one. to help us remember the steps, I've some up with a a short dance for that process. I have challenge the class to come up with a better one, and I know they certainly can! Check in with your child and see what he or she is thinking. If your child is feeling frustrated with the topic, encourage them to hang on- we are working on getting the hang of it! One of the places where I have noticed students struggling is in the division process. They've got the decimals down- but feeling confident with larger numbers is a problem. I strongly encourage you to check in with your child's memory of multiplication facts. Having these memorized will make it easier to tackle large numbers. 3. The Writing ProcessOur Halloween descriptive writing is well under way. Students were given an option this week for writing their rough drafts. They could choose to use their Writer's Notebooks or they could use the Chromebooks. No matter which option they chose, many are making great progress in their drafting! Next week we will polish them up and get them ready for publishing. Check this page out next week to see what we've done! We also mailed out our fall poetry to participate in the America Library of Poetry Fall contest. Stay turned for news of a winner! 4. Messing with MixturesToday in Science, we worked on ways to separate a mixture. Students were given a mix of plaster of paris, water, sugar, and wood shavings and had to think of ways that they could separate it back into it's original components. We'll be wrapping this experiment up on Monday. 5. Snack-time ConcertThank you to Makayla for sharing her talents with the violin at snack this past week. We were treated to a beautiful concert! I can't wait to hear you at the Christmas Concert!
1. Walk-a-thon RecapWe had an AWESOME time at Slater Park last week! Thank you so much for supporting our school. The generosity of those who've donated will help to defray the cost of the different educational programs that come in to our school throughout the year. Last year we had a visit from an author who spoke about his writing process and dance parties throughout the year to celebrate things like Student Appreciation Day. I wonder what this year's surprises will be? Check out aome photos of us on the carousel below... 2. Our New Science UnitAs our newsletter states, our new science unit will focus on studying matter (all of the stuff around us). Today we worked to develop definitions for mixture and substance. We sorted foam stickers to help us do this. Our hands-on activity helped us to develop pretty accurate definitions! This unit features many new words. Strategies like this one help students to master the new words by engaging them in making meaning. Next week, we'll work on learning more terms to help us be chemistry superstars! 3. Descriptive WritingOur next writing unit will build on our work with memoirs by focusing on using figurative language to help boost our descriptions. Things like the use of similes, metaphors, and personification can help our writing to become more mature. While our writing will focus on Halloween or fall, think about sharing similes and metaphors in your conversation with your child to help extend his or her learning. 4. We are Stewards of God's CreationOur current chapter in Religion examines the second creation story in the Book of Genesis. Students learned that God has given us the responsibility to take care of the world around us. Talk with your child about ways that you can be a steward of the gifts we have been given, especially creation! 5. Parent-Teacher ConferencesConference time is coming soon. Many slots are still available. Please return your appointment slip if you haven't done so yet! Thank you!
Sixth Grade tackled many new things this week. We kicked off our week using our Chromebooks to read about current events. We also began our first novel study, Hatchet. While students read with me in small groups, (in order to provide more individualized instruction) other students had their choice of several literacy stations to complete. These stations are designed to offer the children choice over their work (which helps boost engagement in learning) and experiences in authentic literacy tasks. What is an authentic literacy task? It is something that requires the learner to use their reading and writing skills in a meaningful way. Independent reading is an authentic literacy task- students are reading for a real reason- they chose the book! Word work that allows the children to represent word meanings in multiple ways builds vocabulary and word recognition. Stations aren't something that we will do every week, but students definitely worked responsibly and enjoyed what they were doing! Students also peer reviewed their memoirs and provided feedback to encourage and help their classmates grow! Finally, we kicked off our math unit in decimals with a game- students race to read and write decimal numbers the fastest. Students really seemed to love this one!
While it was only a four day week, it was super busy here at WCRS! We've been working on reviewing "Hard and Fast Rules" in grammar- the skills we need to be fluent writers. We also have been reviewing place value concepts in Math. This solid foundation we are reviewing will come in handy when we start our decimal unit. We broke out the whiteboard to change up our classwork on this day: Fri-yay, I mean Friday was probably my favorite day! We started off talking about what we were excited about- But then, we pulled out... the Chromebooks! Our school has purchased a set of 30 Chrimebooks that will help expand out students horizons and the work that they produce. Today we focused on learning how to handle them and use their different functions. We participated in a prediction activity about our upcoming novel study. The day wrapped up with science stations that had students working with fm the different science tools we will use throughout the year.
Our class has been hard at work reviewing key skills needed to be successful this year. Our classmates took turns helping us go over the four basic math operations and came up with questions for us to practice. We also worked at different stations geared toward learning about some of the events on September 11. Students had the opportunity to choose the order in which they completed the stations. Finally, Friday afternoon science involved parter reading about working dogs at airports. Ask your student what they learned!
Friday=fantastic! We spent time today reflecting on our first week. The general consensus? We feel great about our first week and it was an amazing week. We started our Memoir writing unit by writing Six Word Memoirs about our first week of school. Click here for the link to the padlet where we are collecting our memoirs. These were written in groups this morning. Check them out! We wrapped up our day by launching our first unit in science. We'll be studying the ways scientists work and the tools they use to do their jobs. We will start by studying the scientific method. Our dissolving Skittle experiment today will be the basis of our learning. I can't wait to keep going on Tuesday! One of the things that we focused on today was kindness. We talk during a couple of different points of the day about how kindness can make the world a better place for others and for ourselves. First, we took a look at how kind gestures make us feel. Take a look at some of our responses below. We also read the book Each Kindness, by Jacqueline Woodson. There is one strong message in this story, and this class gets it! We also launched this years Kindness Challenge. Each week, we will be challenged to show our kindness in a special way to those around us. We were also challenged to be on the look out to see if anyone in the class is engaging in kind acts and to recognize them for it. More on that later!
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