Explorers - 11/18/22

 Hello Explorer Families!

Thank you to everyone who attended conferences.  It was wonderful to discuss your child’s growth with you.  They are making amazing progress! We appreciate your support and partnership. 

Recycled Items

Thank you to the families who have shared recycled items with us. We are looking for a few additional items: buttons, straws, small pieces of cardboard, and masking tape. Thank you for your help. 

Peek at Our Week

Morning Tubs are opportunities set aside for unstructured inquiry, imaginative play, and an opportunity for students to develop social competencies such as problem solving, planning & collaboration, turn taking, and listening to one another. Students LOVE morning tubs. Ask your child to tell you which tub is his or her favorite.

Language Arts

Before we teach our students to write opinions and support those opinions with reasons, we want to practice this skill verbally. As we all know, opinions come easily for little humans, reasons…not so much. One fun way to practice this skill is to play Would You Rather?. This would be a fun game to try at home. 

As they practice stating their thoughts as opinions and giving reasons for their personal beliefs through both speech and writing, students will learn how to express their ideas in a constructive fashion and how to identify when others are stating facts versus offering opinions.

Science

Math

First grade level mathematicians continue their work with taking away using picture models and crossing off strategies.  Take a pair of dice at home or several playing cards for a quick way to review subtraction facts by taking the smaller number away from the larger number.

Second grade level mathematicians are working with numbers up to 1,000.  We are practicing how to write 4 digit numbers on the board as we act as the teacher as well as  rolling 4 of our special multi-sided dice to create our numbers and compare them with each other.

Third grade level mathematicians are finishing up their unit on estimation and rounding numbers.  We roll dice  to create numbers to round to the nearest ten and hundred as well as story problems which ask us to listen for the necessary information, complete our rounding and either add or subtract to solve.

Social Studies

Our first graders are learning about the difference between goods and services through discussion and brainstorming.  We are learning that throughout our day, we use many different goods and services and talking about how we can tell the difference between goods and services.

Our second graders listened to stories describing rural, urban and suburban types of communities.  We charted the positive and negative aspects of each and decided which was our favorite type of community and why.  We enjoyed listening to the ideas of the group which included enjoying the idea of living in a skyscraper as well as living in the country with a big yard and chickens.