Hello again!

It's Friday already -- the hybrid schedule certainly makes the weeks feel short.  I am still really enjoying getting to know the students who are new to me, and we are all working hard to build community and feel like we belong together.  Students have mastered most of the class routines; they know how to turn in work, how to leave for bathroom breaks, how to access and store materials, etc. They are all very excited about their chromebook cases, pencil cases, and math manipulative bags. Simple pleasures!

This week, we have started our first math unit in earnest. The students have learned the definition of "array" and "factor" and they have started noticing how much easier it is to count objects that are arranged in equal rows.  They have started making their own arrays, and they are continuing this work during their last at-home day.  Next week we will begin learning how we can use the multiplication facts we know to solve the ones we don't know.

We haven't started our first reading or writing units yet. We have learned ideas for what to write about in our Reader's Notebooks, and what to do when we feel like writing gets tough. We have talked a lot more about genre and how to recognize fiction versus nonfiction.  Next week we will finish up some of the initial lessons about reading and writing so that we can begin our first units the following week. Our reading unit will be about characters, and our writing unit will be narrative (fiction) writing. Stay tuned for more information about those!

This week, we all created artwork telling about how we plan to use our hands to change the world. I love the ideas the students came up with! We started by listing all of the things we know are wrong about our world.... which was a sad list. But their enthusiasm and eagerness for how they plan to leave their mark makes me feel optimistic!  We also wrote "I Am From" poems based on George Ella Lyon's poem by the same name. I am so impressed with the feelings these poems evoked for me -- this class rocks! I hope to share those in the same bulletin board format as soon as they are all done.

That's all for this week. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get a lot of time outside enjoying glorious fall weather!