This Week in LL38.....

I hope everyone had a great weekend! I can't believe that we are at the end of the first trimester.  Just a reminder that we have a half day of school on Wednesday.

Goal Setting

     Last week we took an end of trimester 1 assessment in math along with a few fluency assessments.  After taking the assessment, students reflected on their work.  We talk a lot throughout the school year about the importance of assessments as a tool to help understand what a student understands and what a student needs to continue practicing.  An assessment also helps me to plan small groups that target a specific skill area that a group of students needs to work on.  After the trimester 1 assessment last week, the kids each took a look at their own assessment.  They carefully looked at the area that they felt that they needed to focus on the most based on the results of their assessment.  We looked for patterns in the "needs" of the class.  Many students took risks and shared what they needed to work on with the class.  We then formed small group "topics."   Our topics were vocabulary, rereading the problem, knowing the "facts" (ex:  multiplication, addition), and copying work over correctly.  Each of the kids signed up for one area.  We will start meeting to work on that skill over the next few weeks.

Immigration
    We continued our learning about Ellis Island last week.  We started to think about the reasons people decided to immigrate as well as what their journey might have been like.  We used the wordless picture book called The Arrival to learn about the difficulties that immigrants faced on their journey to a new county.  Although The Arrival is a book, we were able to start watching the video of the book.  It is amazing at all of the discussions that we are having about the characters, the mood of the music that goes along with the book, as well as inferring the meaning of some of the symbols in the story.  We will continue to watch this during the week.

The kids had a lot of fun discussing family members that they knew had immigrated to the United States.  Be on the lookout for an immigrant interview page coming home this week.  

Math Workshop
     After taking the trimester and fluency assessment, we started learning about division.  We are learning the area model for division.  This allows us to use our knowledge and understanding about area to solve a division problem.  Here is an example of how we are solving division problems using the area model.  We will continue to practice this throughout the upcoming week as well.



I hope everyone has a great week.

~ Jen