Monday, January 5

 Hi parents,

We had a fantastic first day back. Honestly it was really nice to be back in the classroom. The kids were happy and positive and worked hard.

As you probably guessed, we wrote about our winter breaks. I challenged the class to start with the topic sentence, "The one word that best describes my winter break is _______".

We went over the new spelling words, which are in fact old spelling words, and reviewed the oi, oo, oa, ai, and ea vowel teams.

The students went to Music and Gym in the morning too.

Over the break I had this idea of how to improve Daily LA, in particular, the 'creative writing' station, and I was really excited to try it out today. I've noticed that students on the 'creative writing' station often end up sitting around with writers block, or 'brainstorming' (read: 'sitting around') with other students, and very little actually writing happens. So I introduced this writing bingo card to hopefully give them ideas and motivate them.

Now, when students are on writing, they can pick one of the options above. When they complete four in a row, they get free-choice for their next day on writing. When they get a blackout, they earn an indoor recess with a friend. 

Since I just introduced this today, every student in the class got to do creative writing today, and I was so thrilled by how it went. I hope the enthusiasm continues!

In math, we started our new unit, which is on polygons. We learned that polygons are 2-D, closed shapes, with only straight sides. There are two types of polygons, regular and irregular, which depend on whether all of the sides and angles are equal.

This whole geometry unit is basically just a ton of terminology memorization. The concepts aren't actually that hard, its just a matter of knowing what each term means, and applying it in the right way.

I sent home the addition and subtraction quizzes from before the break. Don't worry - I am a big believer in re-dos. I'm going to keep working with the class on addition and subtraction in small group lessons every morning. We will study geometry at a different time. If you are looking to practice at home, I hope the quizzes give you an idea of the types of content and difficulty level that we're working at!

Have a nice night,

Zac