December Already!

The year sure does fly by when you're having fun!  Let's recap the last two weeks.  Thank you for all our Turkey Trot supporters.  The students ran long and hard for all the contributions!  The Hookele Ohana raised  over $20,000.  Thank you again for your generous donations to support student activities.   I hope the Parent-Activity Day was as fun as it was educational and hope you and your child enjoyed this experience learning more about number lines.  Thank you for the feedback from parent surveys.  

Here is a summary of what happened in our classroom:

​In Langauge Arts... 

• Our essential question this week was How can people help out their community? Together we read Biblioburro by Jeanette Winter.  Using a similar T-chart, students analyzed specific details the author included and discussed why they support the main idea or point the author wants to make.  The story Biblioburro is a narrative nonfiction text.  This true story is about a school teacher from Colombia named Luis Soriano who wanted to share books with children near and far.  We talked about Benjamin Franklin and how he also wanted to share his books with people who would have otherwise not have had access to them.  These two people's love for books and desire to share them with others helped and are continuing to help many in communities.  Using the text Biblioburro and talking about Benjamin Franklin, students learned about how the idea of a lending library all started. ​
• This week the reading standard addressed was Describe how reasons support specific points the author makes in a text.   Previously,  students were taught to identify the main idea of a text or a portion of a text and determine supporting details.  These are prerequisite skills for the standard taught this week.

• Using many expository texts read this week, we charted the text features we found and included a description of its purpose.  For example, a table of contents helps us to find what pages chapters are on, while the index tells us where we can find information about a specific topic.  We did this for all the text features we could find including table of contents, index, glossary, maps, charts, diagrams, captions, headings, and title.​​

​In math...​

• ​Once students understood the concept of base-ten blocks, students learned to add using base-ten with regrouping.  First they used actual base-ten blocks to manipulate and model the problem, then students practiced drawing the process of their thinking out.  
• Students learned when adding two two-digit numbers together, you can estimate the numbers to its nearest ten before adding.  For example when adding 59 + 15, you can change 59 to 60 first then add 15.  The children learned this strategy is useful when you don't need the exact amount but just want a close calculation of the value.  

​In science...​

• Using the engineering design process, students built and designed their seed disperser.  Students designed a model that mimics something in nature, like an animal (biomimicry) that would help disperse seeds over a large area.  Click here for photos of your child.