As a quick reminder, for the students who are applying to the IB program at Moody, the writing prompt will be administered tomorrow after announcements. Your child will have 90 minutes to write to a prompt. We did practice writing to a prompt in class for 90 minutes last Friday, so hopefully this has made your child feel more at ease with the process.
Our field trip is coming up on Friday. I'm sure you have looked at the forecast and the high is 41. Please have your child wear hats, gloves, and a warm coat. We will be outside for the entire trip as it is a walking tour along the James River. Your child will also need to bring a bagged lunch. The lunch will stay on the bus while we walk, so they do not need to worry about carrying it. Our lunch will be on the observation deck of City Hall and the deck is not heated.
Math
As you know, we have spent the last month on computation and word problems. We are wrapping up that unit of study with some extremely hard math problems from the Challenge Math book. This is a book that is written for gifted students and allows them to explore the mathematical concepts at a much deeper level. I love this book because it gives the students a chance to think deeply and to experience and learn from frustration in a safe environment. While our time with the Problem Solving unit is drawing to a close, I will continue to utilize the book as we move through the math objectives this year. There will be a classwork grade given on Thursday where the students will be allowed to use the papers, if needed, to help them solve the problems.
Science
We have entered Phase II of our SOS unit! The students are excitedly searching their clues and trying to locate their families. After Day 1 of clues, yesterday, there were several groups that were really close to finding their family. We have 2 more days of clues to go, but by Friday, your child should know where their family is located. On Monday, they will begin preparing for a presentation to the G.E.T.U. board to share what they have learned. Presentations will take place next Thursday and Friday. On Monday the 24th, we will review science notes and play a game. There will be a unit test on Tuesday, November 25. If you know your child will not be here because you are planning on going out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday early, please let me know and we will come up with a plan for your child.
Language Arts
We have now explored how to write to two different types of prompts: narrative and expository. Your child really made me smile when I read through their "The Trouble with Being..." prompt. For this exercise, your child was asked to come up with a common item and think of a list of reasons that it would be horrible to be that item. The responses were great! This week, we have been working on writing Big Openings, Focused Bodies, and Big Closings to help organize the ideas of their expository paragraph. I am excited to see how your child put their spin on the lessons and what they have written.
We have also completed the second Wordly Wise unit. I am very happy that all of the grades on the second unit were better than the first unit. We will be doing another unit next week.
Extras
We continue to use class dojo to keep track of the beans used in our Bean Economy. You may want to remind your child that fines have increased now that it is a new nine weeks to 50 beans per infraction.
We have also started with a new program that is being used at Short Pump, Executive Functioning. The students took a self assessment to see how well they organize their materials. We then followed up with a lesson on organizing their binders. We went through and made sure everything had holes and that they were then "snapped" into the proper place in the binder. We will revisit this skill monthly. We have also talked about the focus skill of "attentive listening" and how this can help you become a more successful student. We have another activity that we will be doing with this skill later this week.