I hope everyone has a wonderful, safe, fun, relaxing, and whatever-else-you-want-it-to-be break with your families! The students sure deserve some time off after all of their hard work!

In math, we prepared for the Unit 3 Division test which assessed students on all of the various division strategies with whole number and decimal division.  In ELA, students focused on identifying the theme of short stories and well known songs. They did a wonderful job!

Today we celebrated with a band concert, an extended snack, and a Winter Solstice team activity. With Mrs. Gestrich, students heard The Paper Crane by Molly Bang and created origami following the story. Mrs. Buffone taught students how to make snow crystals using household items. Students left with a kit to make snow crystals at home. Kids were able to create Haiku’s and decorate a snowflake with Mrs. Belbin. In my room, our homeroom kiddos made 3-D paper snowflakes. The other classes learned about Wilson Bentley, the first person to photograph snowflakes, while reading Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. They enjoyed seeing his photographs of the intricate snowflakes. Because the other homerooms were not able to create the 3-D paper snowflakes, I promised to post a tutorial. Please see the YouTube video below.

When we return from break, we will dive into fraction, and focus on identifying the main idea of texts before taking on Close Reading.

To my homeroom class – Thank you so much for your kind, thoughtful gifts! I was so surprised by the class gift of the Anzio’s, Hannah’s and Amazon gift cards! You know me so well! The felt soap smells amazing, and I can’t wait to show Aubrey the ornament with her name on it! I know she will just love it! I truly appreciate your thoughtfulness and generosity. =)

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving break!

This week we welcomed December with many discussions about our Key Value of the month: Generosity. Students are writing their thoughts, stories, and poems about generosity. If they choose, they can submit their writing to Mr. Slomski and Ms. Kenny and they may be selected to read their piece during morning announcements! We have some very creative writers in here and I encourage them all to submit their work!

In math, we ended our addition, subtraction, and multiplication of decimals unit and are now exploring the world of division. Students are learning how to divide single digits by multi-digit numbers using the standard algorithm, compatible numbers, the distributive property, and by modeling with base-ten blocks. Please check out the Unit 3 section on the Math page to see videos of demonstrations on how to use complex strategies. Next up, double digit divisors and dividing decimals!

We have finished up our memoirs in ELA and are now currently working on a mini-unit focused on summarizing. The majority of narrative pieces can be summarized using the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then, structure. We have been using a graphic organizer with these headings to make our summaries just right. It’s important for students to remember that the THEN must be connected with the WANTED. We’ve worked on that quite a bit and will continue to work on it if needed. After summarizing, we are going to get into writing Literary Letters as well as working with nonfiction reading/writing.

Mrs. Gestrich’s webpage is up and running! Please hover your mouse on the “More” page and click on Social Studies with Mrs. Gestrich. This will take you right to her Social Studies page, but please take the time to explore the rest of her website.

Kudos

Kudos to Jane, Coco, Charlie S, Omshreya, Marie, Caitlin, Charlie J, and Cameron for presenting their Book Talks this week! The Book Talks were interesting, informative, and intriguing! We are keeping the write up of their book in a binder called Books We Love in the classroom so we can use them to help us pick out our next independent reading book.

I hope everyone has a marvelous weekend!