Our brains our like a muscle, and they have been working overtime these past weeks!  It began last Monday when Mrs. Smits set a challenge before us to protect her “precious,” except we didn’t know what it was, and from what danger?  We had materials to use to build.  Once we saw what she was going to do to a very delicate Pringle, we had to reassess and rebuild.  We learned a lot about ourselves and how we handle stress, a challenge, and group situations.  We had to handle those things indifferent ways this week throughout our learning of new math and group presentation projects too.  We watched a cute short movie today about a piper learning to find food, and talked about how we sometimes want to give up when learning gets hard, but we have to battle through it and overcome initial fears.  We also discussed how our amygdala classifies incoming things as pleasurable or threatening, and sometimes gives us false alarms.  We talked about how we need to think before we react to give our brains time to get information to the prefontal cortex.

In math this week there was a lot of frustration, but that frustration is beginning to turn into learning.  We began by dividing with remainders, then moving toward using pictures to divide, then the area model, and finally the “old school” long division method we know.  The reason for this progression is to allow children to have an understanding of what it is they are doing before memorizing random steps in an algorithm. As a parent I know it is hard to help with the homework when you do not understand it.  There are videos available to your child in the homework.  We just learned the “shortcut,” as we call it, today.  we will be reviewing it on Monday.

In reading we were researching a topic as a group of either severe weather or a natural disaster.  We had subtopics under those topics that we had to focus on, and then we got together as a group and made a poster to present that information.  While we were researching we learned how to synthesize information coming form different sources, how to grow our ideas about a topic, and how to tackle the hard parts by slowing down rereading, drawing a sketch, etc.  We will present these posters to each other on Monday then research a new topic.

In writing we wrote the body to our essays.  We have three reason paragraphs that consist of a reason sentence and a story to support or reasons.  We each have a different thesis we are writing about.  Next week we will work on the introductions and conclusions to our essays.

We took a science test this week!  Hopefully you saw the vocabulary come home and used it to study.  Those will be graded and sent home next week.  Our next topic is “States of Matter.”

Important Dates

December 21- January 2 – Winter Break – Our last day before break will be Wednesday, December 20.  We will return to school on Wednesday, January 3.