High Ability Update

Our anagrams were considerably more challenging this week. The spelling and vocabulary involved led us to discuss some homophones: pane/pain, flee/flea, and hare/hair. The students strained their brains on this week's anagrams, and they were up for the challenge!

With the exception of one particularly complex diagram, students worked independently on a Carroll Diagram packet this week. They worked at their own pace and met with me at assigned checkpoints. Our one-on-one discussions gave me a chance to thoroughly address any areas where the students were needing guidance. They did very well at tackling the geometry challenge. They analyzed the diagrams and filled in the blanks with labels & missing shapes. As for the one diagram that strained their brains more than the others, it was nice for them to have a meeting of the minds. Their work showed they have a good understanding of our HA geometry curriculum:)

The students are totally into our novel! Edward does have a way of reeling you in. I'm happy the students are engrossed in our story. Each student has a binder that is being kept in the classroom. The binder contains all the work we are doing on the novel. The students and I will journal back and forth, discuss vocabulary, keep track of the timeline of the journey, etc... At the conclusion of the novel study, the students will take home the contents of the binder.

We focused on contextual addition and subtraction problems this week. The numbers we worked with were small and easily manageable for these students. On the other hand, interpreting the problem required higher level thinking. We will continue working with one, two, and multistep contextual word problems and build on the lesson. It is hard to explain exactly what we are doing, but the takeaway is they're using algebraic thinking.

The students worked individually on our last fable. They completed a reading analyzer. The primary focus of our discussion was on the moral of the story. We watched a few fables and discussed the moral of the story for each one. This wrapped up our study of fables. We will be focusing on fairy tales next. Our fairy tales study is usually the favorite part of third grade HA, because the students complete three projects on fairy tales. I told the class they're sure to love it:)

Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally. What?!?! PEMDAS. What?!?!? Order of operations is our current focus. Students are learning the order of operations: parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. The students are so excited about this, and they love it already! They won't be taking home their order of operations packets until we are completely done with our PEMDAS lessons. We won't be completing every single problem in their packets; therefore, students that want to do more PEMDAS problems after HA will have some problems on hand. If you are one to have your student do any schoolwork throughout the summer, you may want to hang onto the PEMDAS packet once it comes home. I've been looking forward to this all year, because I know it's a hit with the HA kids & I love watching them thrive on the challenge!

The students presented their findings from their biography research to the class. Each student displayed a picture of their subject, told us when & where the person lived, picked two or three answers to share with the class, and told us what makes that individual a change maker. As we all know, not everyone likes to speak in front of an audience. I hope they found it comforting to get some practice speaking in front of a smaller group than their homerooms. The students spoke clearly and with confidence. Some students were much more thorough on their answers than others. By allowing students to choose two or three sections to speak on, the students were able to pick the areas they felt most confident in. We are heading into my favorite part of fourth grade HA language arts.... Mystery! We start our mystery unit next week. Actually, before we dive into mystery next week, the student that was absent this week will present their biography work.

Time for a check-up! Anyone else hearing the Doc McStuffins song right now? We've reached a checkpoint in our algebra curriculum. Students answered questions on the following algebra strategies/methods: cover-up, substitution, guess-and-test, organized list, and working backwards. From what I've seen, they did very well on their check-ups:)

Email: kapeterson@duneland.k12.in.us
Location: Jackson Elementary School, North 400 East, Valparaiso, IN, USA
Phone: 219-983-3680