Off to a Great Start

As we dive into the new school year, our classroom is buzzing with excitement and curiosity. Here’s a glimpse into what we've been up to so far!

Our First Trip to the Library

This week, we took our first trip to the school library, where the world of books opened up to us. Each student made their own shelf marker to keep our spots on the shelves. We also bookmarked our school’s library website, making it easy to search for books, browse, and borrow. The library is now our go-to place for finding stories that inspire our imagination.

Getting Organized with Our Binders and Folders

Staying organized is key to success, and we've been working hard on this skill. We set up our three-ring binders, dividing them into categories to keep our notes and assignments neatly sorted. We also cleaned and cleared out our green Home Connection folders, ensuring that we’re ready to take important papers home.

Exploring the Writing Process

Writing is a journey, and we're learning each step along the way. We’ve started with brainstorming our ideas, then moved on to drafting our stories. After that, we edit and revise our work, polishing it until it’s ready for publishing. We even wrote short stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end as a formative assessment for the year. These stories showed us where we are in our writing journey and where we can grow.

Discovering Unity and Diversity with a Venn Diagram

In our exploration of unity and diversity, we brainstormed a list of critters that live together in various ecosystems. We organized our ideas into a Venn diagram, showing how different creatures can share similarities and differences while coexisting in harmony. This activity helped us understand the beauty of diversity in nature.

Inquiry-Based Learning: Asking All the Questions

We’re also sharpening our inquiry skills by learning a questioning protocol. We started by brainstorming a list of questions on our own, then worked with our table groups to prioritize and combine them. Together, we narrowed our focus on the theme of unity and diversity, selecting the top five questions that we’re most excited to explore. Next, we will discuss and explore how to turn closed questions into more open-ended ones. Closed questions tend to have a single “Google-able” answer, while more open-ended ones tend to spawn more questions.

Spelling with Morrison-McCall

Spelling is a key part of our language journey, and we’ve kicked off with our first formative assessment, the Morrison McCall Spelling Quiz. This monthly quiz helps us assess our mastery of phonics patterns and tracks our progress throughout the year. Besides the Morrison-McCall quiz, we launched into a review of short vowels, syllables, and morphology with our Reading Rev program.

Goal-Setting for Success

Setting goals is essential, and we practiced how to break big goals into smaller, manageable steps. By focusing on three smaller steps, we can steadily work toward achieving our larger goals throughout the school year. Students were encouraged to think about something they would like to improve upon in or out of school. Parents, you may have some more specific academic goals for us to work on, and we are happy to do that, as well.

Math Focus: Place Value, Comparing, and Rounding

In math, we’ve been reviewing place value, comparing numbers, and practicing rounding. These foundational skills will help us tackle more complex math problems as the year progresses. A short unit, we plan to finish reviewing in the first week of September and move on to unit two, which is all about adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers and ‘borrowing’ across zeros.

Setting Up Showbie Accounts

Finally, we set up our Showbie accounts, where we’ll deposit our work and reflect on our growth over time. Showbie will be our digital portfolio, showcasing our learning journey throughout the year. We will spend a bit of time each week reflecting upon our work and growth as students according to our Learner Profile Traits.

We’re off to a great start, and I can’t wait to see where our learning adventures take us next! Stay tuned for more updates on our classroom journey.