GATE Goings On
February 2016
Thanks / Coming Soon
A special thanks to Alesia, Cathy, Heather, and Ryan for helping assist me at the Geography Bee!
Next week, I am attending my first PARCC training of the year and then will begin to provide information to all teachers involved as to how testing will be handled this year.
Grade 1
First graders will be continuing to explore two and three-dimensional figures by participating in several rigorous math tasks that ask them to create composite shapes comprised of these figures. They will be making noticing statements and asking questions of themselves as they reinforce their knowledge and work through these rigorous tasks
Grade 2
Second graders will be using their previous knowledge of landforms from science to extend this into what causes changes in land. Topics to be discussed will be both weathering and erosion. We will be gathering and interpreting related data and graphing it using bar graphs to be able to come to conclusions about what they have noticed over time.
Grade 3
Students in grade 3 are beginning to work on opinion pieces. Right now we are learning what each piece needs in it to be a strong and convincing piece. Students have been practicing writing pieces. They just finished one about whether or not school was like a prison. Yikes, you should have heard some of those! We will ultimately be choosing a freedom fighter from our nation's history and trying to write to convince someone how important their chosen person was to our nation's development.
Grade 4
Fourth graders are revisiting the idea of divergent questioning. A question is divergent when it is open-ended and could have many answers. Students are being familiarized with the different types of divergent questions so they will ask more in depth questions of one another in discussions. This will prove to have life-long benefits for increasing their critical thinking skills.
Grade 5
Grade 5 students are almost done with their domino run designs that were to include each of Newton's 3 Laws of Motion. Next week,they will be showcasing each run and making presentations to their classmates. Next up, we will be investigating geometric solids and creating a Geo City that must include a given set of solids and criteria.