We’ve been busy and got a lot done, despite all of the snow we have been contending with. We have worked through our core content areas, integrated art, and spent extra time on fluency through Reader’s Theater. We had a classroom auction, this time student-led, and opted into Nevada’s Reading Week. We even had a chance to visit with our kindergartners and show off our ability to read with prosody. (If you are unfamiliar with the term, the students can catch you up!)
Decorating a cereal box is as old a tradition as there is in elementary school. Thanks families for sharing the boxes and for being so generous with Valentines treats.
Thank you to all the parents who were able to assist with our holiday activities. We made snow globes, ornaments, and family gifts. A terrific way to end 2022 and a reminder that Westergard is a great community.
Thank you families for sharing favorite games for the students to open. After following the white elephant gift exchange protocol, student taught each other how to play the games they brought.
Following conferences, we continued our work with multi-digit division, culminating in learning how to divide decimal dividends with two-digit divisors. We worked through our study of air, completed the discussion strategy “Philosophical Chairs” and marched through a couple of hundred years of history with a look at early explorers. Given the delayed starts, the kids managed to cover a lot of content the last couple of weeks.
Oh, and we were filmed using the Visual Thinking Strategy (VTS).
We started inside and then moved outside to build, test and challenge each other with our catapults. We couldn’t chuck real pumpkins, but the candy ones from Winco seemed to work.
We ended the week with a chance for the students to dress up for Halloween. A majority of the students took full advantage of the opportunity.
So impressed with the students who took full advantage of the instructional time leading into Fall Break. From our News Director:
This is the seventh week of school and we have accomplished so much. Our reading skills have been boosted and many other skills have been sharpened.
Since this is almost the end of our second month, we are working on many interesting things. For math, we are working on multiplication with multidigit numbers using the standard algorithm. To practice ELA, we have been reading about Tom Sawyer and his adventures. For writing, we have been reading debates and picking a side and writing about it using I-CERC: introduction, claim, evidence, reasoning, and conclusion. We have also been learning high school level grammar. This is what happens on a normal day in Mr. Grossman’s class every day!
On Thursday September 29th, we were filmed in the classroom. Some of us got interviewed about our Five-Minute Plan. Our Five-Minute Plan is a list of 5 things that we do in the morning when we get to class. We had our first art class and learned about Cubism through Jacob Laurence’s art piece. We made pictures of rooms with a vanishing point.
This is what we have been doing for the last two weeks of school in Mr. Grossman’s class, as we get ready for the fall break.
In just a week, the students begin their Fall Break. Amazing that is has arrived so quickly. In the last few weeks, we have demonstrated the ability to write multi-paragraph essays, multiply and divide decimals, understand the implications of the Earth rotating on an axis, built an understanding of indigenous groups in North and South America, and had way too many indoor recesses.
The focus on routines and procedures, the first two weeks of the school year, paid off. Week three was about content. We started science and a focus on the Earth and the Sun. Using Microsoft Teams and the ability to upload our social studies textbook to the platform, we read about indigenous groups of North and South America. We added and subtracted decimals and continued to expand sentences, this time using subordinating conjunctions. We read about Antartica and water, from our adopted ELA materials, and we completed our first art project. Great week.
Room 360 