The Wallace Wildcat
Dear Wallace School Parents and Guardians,
We are through yet another fantastic week of school here at 1100 Willow Avenue. Over the course of the past few weekly updates, I’ve highlighted many great events throughout our school. From the Block Party to the Student of the Month Celebration, we came together as a community and fostered our relationships. This week, following our Peace Week update, I’d like to switch gears and highlight some of the lessons our students were engaged with recently.
The Week of Respect at Wallace, or what we affectionately call Peace Week, began this Monday October 7th with our #BlueUp initiative. #BlueUp is a national movement meant to honor world day of bullying prevention. Students and Staff wore blue to show our support in this important initiative. Tuesday October 8th was "Push Pause for Peace." During Period 7, an announcement was made at 1:00 pm to "Push Pause for Peace". This was a special time for the entire school to engage in a lesson about peace, respect, and kindness. Friday October 11th was our “Peaceful Dress Up Day” where the students dressed in shirts, shoes, pants, socks, and/or jewelry with signs/messages of peace! We ended our week with our Peace Rally. Students joined together to engage in a spirited celebration of peace. In addition, October Peace Pals were asked to stand for recognition.
First grade is busy working with high frequency words to develop sentences. They also were assessed using our new testing platform Linkit!. For math, some of our friends worked with subtracting by 1’s or 2’s. Our first grade teachers are doing a spectacular job getting their students to work in centers-based activities that foster both independence and collaboration.
In second grade language arts, some of our friends are busy delving deep into the world of providing textual evidence when answering questions about a story. Our teachers are modeling the process for finding evidence, whether through the text or through illustrations, and using what students find to make inferences, an important skill for writing and thinking critically. In second grade math, some of our friends competed against one another in a three-digit addition competition. Teams of students added numbers chosen by other students at random. The “winners” were the students who had the greater number. A great part of this activity was when students had to make a “greater than, less than” statement to justify which side won each round.
In third grade, some of our friends engaged in finding the product of an array by breaking it into parts via a Math Workshop. In ELA, Students are making inferences by using context clues in the novel " The Littles"by completing open-ended questions based on inferences and supporting with text evidence. Students also completed the novel and the extension activities as well as an assessment testing their application of knowledge. As you can see, our teaching staff is zoning in, focusing on, and cultivating these important writing skills across grade levels.
Turning our attention to the fourth grade, our learners honed in on this week's novel study, where students engaged with new learning about point of view. Students determined what point of view the novel is written in and how the different POV’s affect the understanding of the story.
Elsewhere, our 5th graders are busy studying novels, determining the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text by closely reading a text to identify examples of figurative language such as metaphors and similes. As writers, we are writing informative or explanatory responses to topics by using precise language and domain-specific vocabulary to accurately develop a strong thesis, claim, or answer. What smart cookies!
In physical education, our upper grade students are getting into the spirit of the sporting season with lessons about football. And in our always-awesome Kindergarten, our youngest scholars are busy learning the ins-and-outs of the writing process through engaging with some narrative picture prompt tasks.
Please be sure to enjoy a well-deserved three day weekend. We’ll be sure to pick right back up on Tuesday where we left off today – as a vibrant, diverse learning community where awesome things happen every day.
Until next week… Martin Shannon, Principal