Strawberry life continues apace, between breaks and winter cheer!
In literacy, we have been looking at the plot elements of a story. We plotted out the elements of our shared class reading book, Ban this Book, on a story map. Then, we focused on writing realistic characters that shared some of our own identity traits by adding detail. We then looked at the different types of conflict (internal such as person vs. self and external, such as person versus person, nature, and society). We’ve been brainstorming a variety of characters to warm up for the bigger project of writing a realistic fiction story that is. These are the prewriting stages and will be followed by the full writing process of drafting, editing, and publishing. Most recently, we started to focus on characters and we are going to write from the first-person perspective and develop characterization to make them fully realized. Morphology continues, reviewing the 19 morphemes we’ve studied deeply so far. If your kids have been talking about the prefix, base, and suffix of words at the dinner table, encourage and engage them!
In Cultural Studies, we finished our state maps with careful spell-checking and proofing. Following their investigations into the US states, regions, and Indigenous cultural regions, Strawberries each picked a US state to study in-depth and create a map for. They used resources such as National Geographic Kids, Ducksters, Native-Land.ca, census.gov, and good old-fashioned encyclopedias and books, to help them identify important cities, geographical features, highways, landmarks, basic facts, symbols, and points of interest to represent their to-scale map reproductions. Students then created an additional clear overlay to represent the territories of the Indigenous groups that were and are present in each state. Students are conducting self-reflections on their map work, noticing what they are most proud of, what they learned in the process, and what they might have done differently if they were to embark on such a large project again. This reflection process develops students’ metacognition, thinking about thinking, and this is essential for their growth as learners.
In Science, we continued our investigation of circuits, practicing thinking like engineers by trying to problem-solve a scenario in which a lighting company had to recall strings of holiday lights. In this scenario, lights were failing because bulbs were burning out; the whole series would go out. We acted like engineers by replicating the problem with a circuit, and examining different parallel circuits as solutions to the failing light strings. We are presenting our ideas to the lighting company in a letter to the board.
In 4th grade math, we finished our unit on arrays for multiplication. We continued to review our strategies for multi-digit multiplication by shifting our focus to using ratio tables, with the emphasis of looking at landmark numbers, 10, 20, and 30 to self-correct and improve number sense. We’re also looking at pentominoes, shapes with five squares that make different polygons, looking for patterns and examining symmetry and congruency, fourth graders are trying to make all the different possible pentominoes, determining which are the same and which are reflected. We play multiplication and division games after that to reinforce math skills.
5th graders have been steadily working on fractions using a variety of tools and models – Cuisenaire rods that require students to first define the whole, tiles for finding fractions of a set, clock and money models to reference benchmark fractions, and continued use of ratio tables to help find equivalent fractions. Next, they’ve applied their new strategies to different shopping scenarios to answer the question, “Which is the better buy?” Just in time for gift-giving season! Check out these posters students made mapping a river trail and all the landmarks they needed to plot with only the given fractions to work from.