Thank you one all for your contributions to Saturday’s remarkable fundraising event on Fourth Street. We raised nearly six hundred dollars for a refugee family in Oakland! Whether you sang, baked, made artwork, worked the table, came out to support, or just sent good vibes, it was a resounding success. Go 4/5! Civic engagement feels so good: we are building habits that will enrich lives.

The next two weeks are relatively quiet in Cerrito – no big events. We are wrapping up our FOSS: Energy unit in science, so ask your child about the ways in which energy changes form. We have been rolling steel balls down ramps, learning about how gravity acts on objects, how mass is connected to momentum, and what happens when objects collide. Investigations on renewable energy sources and engineering challenges are in our near future.

In cultural studies, we will wrap up our study of Lewis and Clark these next two weeks, looking at some different points of view on the expedition, and even Sacagawea. Not everyone celebrates their contribution to US history, and we will dig into that in our conversations and writing. Slavery will be the main topic in January, with a visit to the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. It’s an essential part of US history, but one that can be hard to discuss with fourth and fifth graders, so we have to be skillful as we choose texts and primary source documents.

In the writer’s workshop, we are focusing on mechanics. Students are writing creatively in their notebooks to keep the spark alive, but we are doing a series of small group rotations on sight words, phonics, grammar through a site called noredink.com, and vocabulary study. It’s time to put those periods in the right places and bear down on those common but tricky spelling words.

Students are reading a ton at school each day, especially in guided literature circles. Teachers have groups of eight students with a range of reading abilities, and we are guiding students to make inferences, examine character traits, identify themes, and just practice their fluency as they read aloud each day. This practice especially supports comprehension skills, and our experience is that students enjoy their books more when they have support understanding them in all their literary complexity. Keep up those read alouds and independent reading efforts at home. It’s golden time, and I know it’s not easy sometimes, but build those reading lives before bed, on rainy days, and whenever else you and get a book in your child’s hand. Screens are no substitute for good novels in print form.

Also, don’t forget the wonderful resource of Dreambox for your child’s math enrichment. We are using it every day in math class as a station. Teachers work with small groups of 3-5 students to support them on worksheets and activities, and sometimes we have as many as three teachers in the class. Dreambox is a great independent station for the group with no teacher, as it provides adaptive curriculum, and teachers can monitor and assign content.

I can’t resist taking photos of our beautiful reading buddy collaborations. Not only is it fun to mix up the grades, but the peer scaffolding and instruction that happens is invaluable. This is one of the hallmarks of good teaching – allow students to explain it to students. There is less of a barrier of years and experiences. Students speak each other’s language, so after I explain a math concept to a student, for example, I will have them explain it to their peer while I supervise. The student who explains it also benefits, of course.

Homework

Write: one page of whatever you would like in your writer’s notebook

Math

• 4th grade: two pages you haven’t finished in your packets
• 5th grade: finish packet

Reading: 20 minutes of something great

Spelling: Willwood study your word ring. Other folks do Spelling City (contractions, etc.). We will spend the week working on it.