Just one day left!

We're almost ready to head out on our K-4th grade adventure. Time is running out to let me know any important ways I can be supporting your child on the trip, so please let me know if there's anything extra I can be doing to make sure this trip is full of growth and fun.

Since the 3rd and 4th graders will be acting as older buddies to the Kindergartners on the trip, we spent some time with Peggy's class today. Our class stepped up to teach them some of the team-building games and challenges that we've done in our class.

Here are some highlights from recent life in the 3rd and 4th grade...

• We've started working in our Math Expressions workbooks. The students know that they can expect me to choose the pages and projects that I'd like them to work by considering what they need right now in their math learning. This means that students are working on some of the following skills...
• multiplication fact review
• arrays and other multiplication modeling techniques
• division and deepening understanding of its relation to multiplication
• place value
• writing numbers in both expanded and standard form
• addition and subtraction fact review
• addition and subtraction with regrouping
• We are continuing our work with personal narrative writing. The writers are incredible at finding specific, small moments to write about that they remember with crystal-clarity because they made them feel something. They are working on zooming in to include the details that make their narratives engaging and personal. They are remembering to tell their stories in a step-by-step way by watching the movie of the memory in their minds, rather than telling about a memory. I love watching the young writers see their experiences as being valuable and worthy of being captured in writing, because they are!
• Last week, we had a meeting facilitation workshop in which the students practiced their skills for taking over my job as class meeting leader. They practiced selecting topics for discussion that are important to the group and calling on speakers with our "hands" technique. They worked on repeating back a synthesized version of the discussion so that the speakers feel heard and the class has clarity. They worked on using some specific clues combined with their intuition to decide when the group is ready to vote and likely to have consensus. I imagine that it's clear, but I'm so inspired by this part of the 3rd/4th grade program and I already see such impressive growth in our classroom democracy.