BLS Express: Explorers

Hello Explorer Families!

We hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving weekend. We are always grateful for your support and partnership!

We are collecting and sorting mittens and gloves now until December 15th. This community service project ties in with our PBL project.

Reminders

Please label ALL of your child’s winter gear - it will make it easier to get it back to you.

PBL

We are beginning a project based learning unit during our science and social studies time slots. Students work on a project over an extended period of time that engages them in solving a real-world problem or answering a complex question. They demonstrate their knowledge and skills by creating a public product or presentation for a real audience. It honors the student’s individual learning style and thinking ability as they develop their outcomesAs a result, students develop deep content knowledge as well as critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication skills.

Our inquiry can be summed up in the driving question, “How can we affect homelessness in our community?” Homelessness has many faces. It can be heartbreakingly obvious. Other times, it’s less visible but no less destructive. Students will determine possible causes and review strategies that have been implemented to address this issue. Students analyze possible solutions to act on and how to best communicate these problem-solving ideas to a real authentic audience composed of students, families, and our community.

Ask your child:

What does it mean to be homeless?
How do people become homeless?

Language Arts

Picture of the Day is a great way to practice three very important skills in reading-- observing details by being able to describe them and making inferences about what you notice and observe based on what you see and what you already know. Observing, describing and making inferences are what good readers do. Pictures give students an opportunity to practice these reading skills & strategies without text, but transfer the same line of thinking when reading text. Students are naturally good observers, but they do not always pay close attention to the detail unless given an opportunity and invitation to do so. Like anything, this skill takes time and practice. In addition, if we give students the “framework” for speaking, they are truly thinking and speaking critically and working in the highest orders of thinking. We will also use these same skills during our PBL.

Math

Our first grade level mathematicians are learning to create and solve a bar model to represent a subtraction problem. This is a way to use a visual model to solve a problem.

Our second grade level mathematicians are working with numbers into the thousands and learning how the number changes when we add and take away from the hundreds, tens and ones place. For example, one hundred less than 275 is 175.

Our third grade level mathematicians are beginning their study of data interpretation and how to read as well as create a table containing gathered data. We will even be creating our own data tables after gathering information from classmates.

Social Studies

Our first graders are continuing their understanding of goods and services, using ideas to categorize various goods and services to prepare us for making our own service business and deciding what types of goods we will create.

Our second graders finished their study on the three different types of communities: rural, urban and suburban. We shared characteristics of each and decided which would best suit our needs, charting the good points and negatives aspects of each. It is wonderful to hear all of our second graders sharing their thoughts and opinions with the group.