Hi Everyone!

Last Friday was our Wizarding World so I never had a moment to write a blog post!  If I had written one, it would have said "party, party, party!" Our week seemed to be filled with celebrations as we finished up a variety of units and found ways to go out with a bang. We made candy maps to celebrate our geography unit. We had a bonfire and cocoa to celebrate our writing unit. And finally, we had a soap whittling party to celebrate the end of our reading unit (since the main character in our mentor book was a whittler.)  On top of that, we had a harvest celebration and ate treats and brain jello. Phew! It was good to get back to our routine this week.

This week, we have been busy with division. As I suspected, many students are feeling a little worried since they can't quite wrap their heads around division yet. I am not worried -- it is early in the unit, and we will revisit division later in the year.  For now, here is a brief lesson in how we are expecting students to tackle division:

We ask that they read the story problem and then find an equation to reflect the story. Then we ask them to turn that around into a multiplication problem with a missing factor.

I am making 128 cookies. I can fit 8 on each cookie sheet. How many cookie sheets will I need?
Equations: 128 ÷ 8 = _____    OR  8 X ___ = 128

Next, we ask students to use what they know to build up to 128. For example, they can do the following:

8 X 10 = 80
8 X 5 = 40
8 X 15 = 120
8 X 16 = 128

Of course, this is far more complicated when there is a remainder! We've talked about the remainder a a bit this week, and we have discovered that what you do with the remainder depends upon the story context.  Look for some division homework coming home next week!

We have started our non-fiction reading and writing units. In reading, we are looking how to look through the text to preview it before we begin. By doing this, we can see how it is set up and that will help us know what to expect as we read it. Writing is similar -- we are choosing topics we know a lot about and we are thinking about how we would organize the topic into sub-topics by using a table of contents. I love this writing unit because I think the structure is really helpful for young writers -- as opposed to the narrative unit which was so open-ended!

Finally, we are wrapping up our natural resources unit. Next week, students will begin researching one renewable energy source and one non-renewable energy source, and they will look at the pros and cons of each. Our goal is to have them see how they can be stewards of our environment in every choice they make.

On a related note, Mattea's mom Juliana came into our classroom today to teach us about water quality and how we can protect Lake Champlain even right here at JES by looking around the property and identifying places where a berm, a swale, a rain barrel, a rain garden, etc. might help keep the water and the nutrients from flowing into the lake. Although it is a Friday afternoon and most of the students were pretty bumpy and ready for lunch, I know they learned a lot from this presentation, and it goes right along with our stewardship conversations!  Thank you, Juliana!

I hope to see many of you next week at our Thanksgiving lunch or during the Scholastic Book Fair. Also, please be sure to send me your favorite recipes so we can put them into our JES cookbook -- our first fundraiser for our year-end trip!  You can send in several recipes!

Next week's sharing theme: Something hand-made.

Enjoy your weekend!