Saturday, September 07, 2013

Back To School



We have completed our first seven days of school and we are off to a wonderful start!  We have been learning new routines and getting used to being in a completely different part of the building.  The students say they really like the classroom, plants and all, and they really love their lockers.

Our beautiful new Chromebooks have arrived and we are in the process of setting them up so that students may begin utilizing them to enrich and enhance their learning investigations.

We started our first Reading Workshop unit, Building A Reading Life, and it is already clear that these students are voracious readers.  How wonderful that they simply love to read.  As one student put it, I don't read because I am trying to reach a goal of completing a certain number of books, but I read because I love reading!"

We have begun our first math unit, Number Puzzles and Multiple Towers in which we review and learn many different properties of number.  We have been working to develop and deepen our understanding of math vocabulary so that we can have rich, meaningful discussions about math.

In Social Studies we begin with a unit on geography and map skills.  We have been analyzing many different types of maps and learning how they convey important information.  Soon we will move on to learning how to locate places using latitude and longitude and we will review and extend our geographic vocabulary.

This week we will begin studying about cells in Science.  I am eager to introduce students to the microscopic world that exists all around them yet is invisible to the naked eye.  We have many different investigations and labs to pursue and I hope that students will find cell biology to be an exciting new world to discover.  Two wonderful websites that we will utilize are Cells Alive and Inside A Cell.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

A great start to the year and looking forward to following up on the progress!