A4 News: Fall-ing into Routines

Greetings A-4 Families:

As the year continues on, our routines are taking shape. We are moving into a rhythm that helps us to move through our days more efficiently and effectively.

Last week we took some time to assess our first unit in Math. At the beginning of each unit we have a pre-assessment and then a post at the end to help us establish growth goals. We will continue to work with multiplication and review the concepts as we move forward. In fact, you may have noticed that the Weekly Review now has an additional 2 point Review section to help us track students' ability to retain past practices.

Next week we will begin work on our next unit - place value and big numbers. This will serve as a refresher and extension of the multi-digit number sense. We will be working with numbers into the millions.

In our Reading time, we have begun a very exciting Character Project. Most of the work will be done in class, however, in order to reach the due date of Oct. 23, some students may need to bring parts home to ensure success. In this project, we are focusing on one character and identifying his/her description, motives, hopes, fears, struggles, interactions with other characters and making sense of how the character changes through the book.

We hope that this next week will be the week of final revision for our current Narrative writing story. We will be working to morph and revise our drafts and different sections this week into a final draft. Living a "Writerly life" allows for kids to really delve into the process. In future units, we will move more quickly through the process.

We continue our focus of the world - inside and out! We finished making our clay models of the Earth's layers and now we are onto mapping and landforms. This is a wonderful study and the kids are very engaged. We have begun to learn about the theory of Pangea, plate tectonics and continental drift. This will lead us into a deeper study of landforms, rocks & minerals.

"HW100" - As you all know, this is Hubbard Woods' 100th birthday year. We are celebrating by researching through the decades. Our class is in charge of 1915 - 1920. Sept. & Oct. have been focused on the school itself and Winnetka during our time period. It has been very interesting and enriching to learn about it all. We will certainly have a great deal of fun with it too. One of our ideas is to create our own "Charlie Chaplin - like" movie to share with the school during one of our Town Hall meetings.

I am looking forward to spending time with each of you over the next week during conferences.

I hope you all have enjoyed the long holiday weekend.

New month - New room arrangement