Wednesday, December 6

 Hi parents,

We had a pretty good day today. A huge chunk of our day was spent re-doing the paragraph planning sheets. This time, the students spent a solid 30 minutes just working on their topic sentences, and sub-topic sentences. We broke the rest of the planning up into 15-minute chunks per sentence, so students had ample time to really consider whether their writing made sense and flowed in a logical way. It's definitely looking better now. Tomorrow's work will be revising to add transition words, remove repetitive language, and upgrade adjectives.

In math, we looked at bar graphs, and talked about situations where a bar graph would be more useful than a line graph, and vise versa.

We did Daily LA, read a Rover's Tale, and learned about levers, pulleys, and other simple machines, from this excellent episode of Science Max! If your child isn't sick of it yet, I recommend giving it another watch at home - it's awesome!

On that note: we're going to start building our Mars Rover models next week. Please send in any cardboard, tape, containers, etc. (anything from the recycling bin really) that could help your child, and potentially their classmates, in constructing a Mars Rover model. The students will also be able to use K-NEX or Lego, but they'll have to be careful about making sure it doesn't get mixed in with the other supplies.

Have a nice night,

Zac