Holiday Craft Fair!

The Holiday Craft Fair was a great success for Team Esprit!  Our finger knitted snakes and other knitted items were a huge hit, as well as our imaginary friends and thumb print cards!  Our team earned almost $200 to be used for field trips this year.  A huge thank you to everyone for making this event a success for our team. We still have a few items left which we are selling for 2 for $1.

In Math, we continued our learning about three digit subtraction and practiced a variety of strategies to help us become more efficient mathematicians.  We are learning about using a numberline for strategies such as constant difference, finding the difference and removal (take away). Next week we will do more work with rounding and using expanded notation to represent our thinking.

Miss Deb's class did two more investigations this week, during our Forces and Motion unit, that gave them the opportunity to become engineers.  Her class designed carts that can roll from a starting place to another place with only a small push or pull.  For their second investigation, they had to improve the design of their cart to make it travel a farther distance.  For each of their designs, they recorded data about distance traveled in centimeters, and used that data to determine which design was best.


Miss Niles's class conducted two investigations this week.  In one we worked with magnets to see how the size of the magnetic field affects how far away it can attract and object.  We also started investigating motion by creating wheel systems and noticing how they roll down ramp. Be sure to ask your child about his or her wheel system.  Did it roll straight down the ramp or curve to one side.  Can your child tell you why?

In writer's workshop, we have been reading and writing poetry.  We have noticed that poets use metaphors and similes in their writing and that poets also use a lot of repetition.  Ask your child about the poems he or she has written!

Next week, our team will spend some time reading African folktales and learning about Africa.  We will be doing this to prepare for our field trip to the Flynn Theater on January 3rd (the first day back from vacation), to see Cirque Mother Africa.