Weekly Newsletter

A friendly reminder to please send your children in dressed for the weather! Except for extremely cold weather most classes will be outside for recess every day. If your child doesn’t have snow pants when there is snow on the ground, they will have to stay on the blacktop. I have some extra gear in the health office to borrow but run out quickly. We could always use additional waterproof mittens, jackets, and snow pants if you happen to have extra at home. This is the link for the school district’s guidelines for dressing for the weather. Please take a look and let me know if you could use help getting cold-weather clothing at mwhitaker@mtrsd.org.

How do computers do what they do? This December, students will be exploring concepts around coding in the library, online and offline. We will make and solve secret codes, read about famous programmers, and experiment with block-coding using code.org’s engaging “Hour of Code” programs. One goal of the library is to teach students how to use technology safely and responsibly, and part of this education includes understanding how computers work. Stay tuned!

I’m also thrilled to announce some exciting news! This fall, Sanderson and Colrain Central teamed up to apply for a grant to update our nonfiction collection since both of these libraries have smaller book budgets than the other MTRSD libraries. We are the lucky recipients of a nation-wide grant from the National Education Association Foundation’s Student Success grant program. Each school library will be able to add $2500 worth of nonfiction books to meet students’ interests and to offer texts with current information. Thank you to the NEA Foundation!

Last, I wanted to share the wonderful posters created by 5th graders in recognition of National Native American Heritage month. For this project, students used our online databases to research one of the Native American authors or illustrators featured in our library. Working in groups, they used Google Drawings to create posters that were informative, symmetrical, easy to read, and eye-catching. They did great work!

We had such a good time reading different versions of Little Red Hen and Stone Soup that we are going to continue our Folktale exploration for the month of December. We will be reading, acting out, and making up our own versions of some other well known stories such as The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and The Three Bears and The Gingerbread Man.

In keeping with our kindness theme, the dramatic play center has been transformed into a veterinary clinic. The children are so excited to help the sick and injured pets and to perform well care checks too. Most of the children have taken a family pet to the vet’s before, so they are familiar with what happens at an appointment. The rich language, writing and turn taking has been rewarding to witness. Preschoolers are making appointments and providing care and writing prescriptions for medications when needed. They are also waiting patiently in the waiting room chairs for their assigned time to be seen by the veterinarian. The tenderness in the room is palpable!

It’s hard to believe December is already here and the wintery snowy weather has arrived! First graders started a new science unit focusing on sound and light. To kick off the unit we took a mug and placed clear plastic wrap on top with a rubber band and sprinkled salt over the top. With a few taps on the mug first graders saw the salt dancing across the top! They were surprised to learn that we not only hear sound, but we can also feel and see them too! We also talked about the difference between loud and soft noises as well as low pitch and high pitched sounds. Over the next few weeks we will try out some various investigations to help us learn more!

Our December number corner has us learning about three dimensional shapes such as a sphere, cube, rectangular prism and a cylinder. We also learned some new vocabulary (face, vertex and edge) to help us understand and identify these shapes a bit more. After learning about these four three dimensional shapes we had fun being shape detectives. Each first grader found an item in the room and had to decide if it was a sphere, cube, cylinder or a rectangular prism. First graders got super creative and found objects such as the wand for reading the morning message, the bench seat, the middle section of a wobble seat, a pencil container to hold pencils as well as a large big book. What shapes can you find at home?!

Third grade is happy to have moved on to Module 2 in our Language Arts curriculum. With this new module, we first turn our attention to fictional reading and writing in the form of pourquoi tales. Our first tale is called “Why Frogs Have Long Tongues,” and it introduces the genre of tales that explain something in nature.

In Social Studies we are turning our attention to maps of Massachusetts. Third graders are expected to know landmarks, waterways, cities, mountains, and neighboring states. We have a map of twenty-two items which we are working on memorizing. This is also an opportunity to practice writing lots of proper nouns with their capital letters.

Last week we welcomed our first accumulating snow, and some of the class worked together to make snowmen. We also baked one of our pumpkins from the garden and turned it into pumpkin pudding. This was a big hit and got rave reviews from everyone! We hope everyone enjoyed the Thanksgiving break.

Fourth graders are about to embark on a new and exciting science unit: ENERGY. This unit is made up of five different lessons. In the first lesson, students learn that when something is moving, it has energy. We will also learn how energy can be stored in food, batteries, gasoline, and even rubber bands. We will build an amusement park ride that uses rubber bands and figure out how to create the fastest, most exciting ride! In the second lesson, we will learn about how roller coasters move so fast, all without a motor (the motor is in the track of the first hill). We will learn about how hills can store energy. The higher the hill, the more energy, the faster the coaster can go! In the third lesson, we will investigate how energy transfers when objects collide. We will build a racetrack for marbles, and make predictions about how far a marble would launch over a jump after colliding with other objects. The fourth lesson has us studying energy by exploring how energy is stored and transferred in various situations involving "chain reactions" (also known as Rube Goldberg devices). These are things like falling dominoes, warehouse shelves being toppled over, and most fun of all, machines that are deliberately complex in order to amuse us. In the fifth lesson, we will continue creating our own "chain reaction machines,” adding additional steps to the ramps we designed in lesson four. We will be honing our problem-solving and engineering skills along the way!

Here are some ways you can support our learning at home:

Watch the Goliath Roller Coaster. It’s the tallest and fastest wooden roller coaster in the world. You can also share your experiences riding roller coasters or other amusement park rides.

As we get into the “chain reaction machines,” you can help your child find items at home which might make a good component of their machine. You can help your child brainstorm ideas and locate these items around the house. There are basically three categories of items that are helpful: topplers, rollers, and ramps.

(1) Things that make good topplers are items like dominoes, LEGO bricks (which can be used to create dominoes), small books, old VHS and audio cassettes, etc.

(2) Things that make good rollers include items like marbles, small toy cars, bouncy balls, etc.

(3) Things that make good ramps include binders, heavy paper or card stock, the tracks from matchbox cars (such as Hot Wheels tracks), etc.

You can also enjoy watching this video by a popular band called OK Go. They are famous for their use of Rube Goldberg machines in their music video.

Fifth grade has written monologues. Students had taken a character from a scene in the book, Esperanza Rising, and had each written a monologue from their chosen character’s point of view. They are now working on writing a director’s note to explain what UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) article was threatened in the scene and how that right is still threatened today. They are creating programs that will include the director’s note, cast, and order of the monologues for their group to perform early next week.

Looking for a fun way to support your child’s mathematical learning? Play board games, card games, dominoes and CHAT! Having discussions around math is such a powerful way to support your child’s mathematical understanding. Enjoy! :) aprew@mtrsd.org

Reading to children helps build important language skills, vocabulary and comprehension. Here are some suggestions from the Institute of Education Sciences on ways to support language development through asking and answering questions about a story: Asking and Answering Questions About a Story