Team 16 Update

Hello Team 16 and Families,

Welcome back!  I hope everyone had a great and relaxing vacation.  We are off to a great start.  We started Unit 5 in Math and learned how to extend multiplication facts.  Students shared their strategies on how they solved the problems.  We will be moving on to partial products of multi-digit multiplication and finally learning the traditional method for solving multi-digit multiplication.

In writing, we watched a video on TREE.  Ask your child what TREE stands for and why TREE will help us in writing. Team 16 is started to write opinion/persuasion pieces.  Their writing homework is a preview and a good way to start.  This gives the students' a way to use vivid adjectives and be creative as they try to persuade people.  Tomorrow, we will start writing an opinion piece and the children get to pick their own topics.

In reading, we are starting new reading groups.  I ran out of time today to get everyone's group started.  I will finish the groups tomorrow.  I am trying smaller reading groups this time to see if students can really discuss the book and can meet frequently.  We had run into some problems with larger groups as some kids didn't finish the work or they were absent.  We will try this and see how well it works out.  In addition, we are going to start shorter reading passages with questions for the students to answer to show understanding.  We will practice going back into the passage and underlining important parts.  I will also start sending some home for homework.  This is great practice for the MCAS's.

Students also worked on updating their google site with work they are proud of.  I will be showing this to you at conference time along with assessment data.  I am going to send out a doodle link for conference sign-up this week.  I apologize for the delay.

We have our last session of Just Like Me this Wednesday and Thursday.

If you feel like it, check out my new blog.  I created a game-based site focused on STEM activities.  It is a work in progress.  I welcome feedback. Please click on the link below to check it out if you want:
Click Here to View Game-Based Educational Blog

Thank you!
Susan