Hopefully the snow is passed and we are back to our regularly scheduled events. I took down all the snowflakes in the classroom and sent them home just to make sure. This past week students finished up a number of projects they had begun before the break. It was exciting to read their writing and watch their book commercials over the long weekend. They are building fantastic portfolios of work to show off for you in April. We also had a short but fascinating trip to the Wave Research Lab at OSU this past week. We learned A LOT about how civil engineers design and test ideas to improve building stability and evacuation systems in the event of a tsunami. This was a great introduction to our own civil engineering project that we will begin in a few weeks. We are also especially grateful that they made some waves just for our visit and the the parent chaperones who helped out! Read-A-Thon On Friday we had an introduction to the Read-A-Thon and students should have brought home their envelopes. From now until January 23rd students can collect pledges. I encourage everyone to participate in whatever capacity they can. STAR This week, on Tuesday, students will take their second STAR screening for Math. The screenings happen 3 times a year (Fall, Winter, Spring). Next week, students will take the reading screening. As a reminder, this a 34 question multiple choice adaptive test that we use as information to assess how students have grown and how we are doing as teachers. I will send home student results following the test. Writing I am excited to begin a new writing unit this week on non-fiction writing. Students will be doing some non-fiction writing (and reading) on countries around the world and later as we get closer to spring break they will be doing some non-fiction writing on Oregon History. Reading Students had a little bit of reading homework this past week: to either finish or revise their Inside Out Test. Unfortunately, this is some of our work that got a bit mixed up with all the snow days, so I wanted to give students extra time to finish it thoughtfully. There is a chance your student needs to still finish that up this week, and I will be reminding them in class if that is the case. In other reading new we are working on an in class current events project at the moment. Last week students selected and read articles and this week we will focus on how do we find the who, what, when, where, why and other important details from the article. I love learning about the topics students are interested in, we certainly have wide range of interests. Students will create presentations using Google Slides for this project so we are also learning about how to format and plan a polished presentation (that doesn't have too many words on the slides). Science This week we return our focus to earthquakes. Students will become familiar with the different types of faults, ways we measure earthquakes and the impacts of earthquakes on land and people. Finally, we will choose a new Read Aloud book this week. Will it be Inside Out and Back Again or Return to Sender?
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