Conferences, Virtual Open House, and more!

Celebrations

We had a successful first week of 4 in-person days! The kids handled all the new transitions really well.  We signed our Wizards Constitution and the students started designing the next Wizards t-shirt. Our students are living up to our high expectations and impress us every day with their engagement in classes. 

Virtual Open House: Watch this video!  It's 24 minutes long. Which is about how long we would have talked at a normal open house event. At least now you can make some popcorn, sit on the couch and watch it at your leisure. 😁 

Conferences 

Parent-teacher conferences will be held over the upcoming weeks. These conferences will be a check-in to update you on your student's transition to middle school, their progress with content learning in addition to self-direction and social/emotional learning.  Conferences will be 15 minutes and happen via zoom.  

Sign up soon by clicking HERE!

Wizards Constitution

This past Monday we finalized our Wizards Constitution.  We reflected on the importance of agreeing to how we work together so that we can all come to school each day feeling welcomed and able to learn.  

Wizard t-shirt design & voting

As another team building activity, we are currently collecting designs for this year's team Wizard t-shirts and sweatshirts.  We are encouraging all students to submit designs.  

Designs should be 

- simple

- neat

- completed in pencil or dark ink

- white background only 

Previous team shirts

Math & Number Corner

We began our work exploring efficient strategies for multiplying multi-digit numbers.  Ask your students about the following strategies:

- Doubling & halving

- The over/under strategy

- 5 is half of 10, 50 is half of 100

- Partial Products

We began Number Corner this week.  We started with an activity where students will collect and graph data by observing how the mass of two carrots changes over time.  

Finding the mass of our carrots

Language Arts

This week we talked about the benefits and importance of reading each day.  Here are the graphics that the students analyzed. Hopefully, they now have a deeper understanding of the importance of the 20 minutes of reading homework. (Audio books and graphic novels count as reading too!) However, students know they should be mixing it up and reading all different formats.  I continually conference with students on their reading selections and encourage them to get a varied "diet" of books.

I typically have a flexible seating classroom but COVID has restricted this. So they can stay in their own space but have some options.  I've never seen kids so excited to get to sit on or under their desks during our read-aloud time! You would have thought they won the lottery when I told them this! Here's what that looks like...

Read Aloud

Group Work