Greetings and Happy New Year from the Wizards. We had an exciting few days before the break that included all students receiving a Wizard shirt. Thank you so much for the very generous donations from Wizard families that enabled every student to have a shirt. We are very proud of our Wizard designers and it has been great to see the team spirit as students wore their shirts. We also had a surprise gift from a Wizard alumna, Sally. Every year before December break, Sally would give a sleigh made of candy to every Wizard and we used to have double the amount of students! This year despite being retired, Sally made a sleigh for all of your children. Needless to say, they were extremely excited to see this gift. We hope it is a reminder of the kindness and generosity that makes the world a better place. Lastly, we had our talent show. More details about that in a moment. We hope that you and your family had a relaxing break and we look forward to having your student back at school this week!
Remote Snow Days
When our HUUSD calls a snow day, please help your student to check email to look for important links or notifications. Next students should log onto their LA google classroom to find our agenda. The agenda will be the same as all Wednesday remote days and therefore should be familiar to your student. As for Wizard core class expectations, students will be expected to attend the zoom meetings and do some independent work as well. They should be ready to attend their AG zoom meeting at 9:00 and they should be able to find the link in their email.
Highlights from the Wizards Talent Show
Despite everything being so different this year, we continued a pre-break tradition of a Wizards talent show. It was truly a joy to see the students who were willing to share their talent in front of peers and to see the support our team gave those students who shared. Despite this being a team building and just plain fun activity, we also incorporated lessons in how to be a supportive member of an audience, and our students made us proud.
Update from Math
We are building on 4th-grade fraction concepts by expanding to operations with fractions. Students are currently learning to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators and will next continue with multiplication and division with fractions and whole numbers.
Update from LA
Right before the break, we completed our first round of empathy themed books, and students completed a variety of projects while reading their books. Within this novel study, the students learned about plot, conflict, theme, and character change. You can see their Book Recommendations here. They have selected a second book related to the empathy theme to read and will start those this week. We've just begun a unit on Personal Narrative Writing that started with us reflecting on how the events of 2020 impacted us. I'm looking forward to having them document the history of their experiences over the last year!
Update from Science and Social Studies
Moving forward, students will have either Ms. Anderman for Science or Mrs. Michael for Social Studies. We will be switching groups sometime in March so students will be learning both the Science and Social Studies curriculum, just at different times. They are still grouped with their Core pod.
Science
We are starting a unit on the earth system and 4 spheres - geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Students will be practicing scientific modeling and investigating how these spheres interact.
Social Studies
We began a Geography and Map Skills unit this week. Each day Mrs. Michael's alter ego, "Agent Mishka," sends the students on a mission so that they can learn and apply important geography skills and earn "Special Agent" status. If you watch the video, please forgive my terrible accent! My husband constantly reminds me of how bad I am at accents but it makes the unit more fun. :)
Comments
Post a Comment