March 6, 2017

The past couple weeks have been very exciting and we have started a lot of new stuff. Students have been hard at work picking up a ton of new ideas.

A couple weeks ago we started introducing handwriting and cursive lessons that have captivated a lot of children. Instead focusing on just "this is how to write a cursive A", we are introducing students to the idea of handwriting involving muscle training throughout your arm and shoulder. We did exercises that made students aware of the muscles they use when writing and how we need to train weaker muscles to learn how to write using motion of their whole arm instead of just wiggling fingers. We shared really stunning examples of handwriting (that I found on Reddit.com/r/handwriting), as well as viewing handwriting like art, which have inspired many kids to really focus on their writing. Through these, we have been introducing cursive using sections of chunks of letters that have similar motions.

Lit Circles have been wrapping up our books on cultural diversity and Wednesday students will present their posters that highlight their job and what their book was about. Our next section of lit circles will focus on biographies and will go out either Wednesday or Monday.

We have also returned a focus to word problems and how to solve them. We have been practicing a variety of word problems to learn how to show the process of solving them in a variety of ways.

Students had fun working on "Geometry Plane Art" and have now expanded into making their own art.

We have also introduced our unit on Ancient Greece and Greek city states.

Hop-A-Thon was a success! The students paired up and counted each other's hops. Most students hopped over 100 hops and many others also reached 200! 

​Ms. Nicole & Ms. Alyx