Monday, November 27th

Welcome back!  We had a good start to our week.  Check out some pictures below from our week before break.

Here is our MAP Testing Schedule:
12/12 at 9:10 - Math
12/13 at 9:10 - Reading
12/14 at 8:20 - ELA

Wednesday, November 1st

Y'all!  It's NOVEMBER! I do not even know how we got here, but alas, here we are. :)

We have had a great start to term 3!  We have spent the early part of the week completing some tasks from term 2.  We have completed all end of term assessments (a few are finishing up their final questions), and we are almost finished publishing our nonfiction essays.  Students are working to finish their cover design for their journals.  This is a way for them to express their understanding of our unit of inquiry in a new way.  Completed journals have been sent home.  Others will be home soon.

We kicked off Term 3 yesterday!
Term 3 Unit of Inquiry
Theme: How We Organize Ourselves
Central Idea: Knowledge of the past can be used to organize and make decisions about the future.
Lines of inquiry and key concepts: Processes of change (change), Ways to organize for decision making (causation), How past events influence the decision making process (reflection)
Here's how we decomposed our central idea to clarify for meaning:

Students were shown an important video from Ms. Newton.  She explained in the video that City Schools of Decatur had made some decisions in order to accommodate for our ever expanding district.  She explained that while we would like students to discuss the decisions, they were final and would be implemented immediately.  

The decisions provided were:

-Students would be required to pay $1 for paper (including handouts given by the teachers) in order to encourage iPad use and go green.

-4th grade students would pay $20 to pay for repainting the walls of the school at the end of each year.

--if there is a 50% chance of snow or greater, students would be required to house teachers so that we would not miss any school days.

As you can imagine, our class had some strong opinions about these topics.  They were challenged to find both positive and negative impacts of the decisions.  I believe the word "Revolution" were used by some.  Ask your child to tell you more and share information about the second video from Ms. Newton!!

As we inquire into processes of change, we created an experimental design in hopes of creating the water cycle in a plastic bottle  This is a simple task that can easily be recreated at home (with parental assistance).  You simply need a 2 liter bottle, a plastic cup, ice, and boiling water.  See the model below and ask your child to tell you more about evaporation, condensation, and precipitation as it relates to our water bottle activity!

We kicked off our geometry unit by inquiring into area and perimeter.  Students worked with tiles to create rectangles with given measurements.  The utilized the equations for area and perimeter to solve for both measurements.

 We are excited to have visitors in our building from IB for the remainder of the week!  They will be visiting classrooms, speaking with the staff, and students, and getting a sense of the amazing learning that happens every day at F.AVE!

Math-a-thon is this week!  It begins after school on Friday and will run through the end of the school day on Friday of next week.  Be sure to get your pledges!

Our walking field trip to Hawk Hollow (just a few blocks from F.AVE) has been changed to November 9th.  We will leave a little after 8 and return close to 10:30.  Lunch will not be affected.

Have a great night!!!