Week of March 18th

 Character Development

 

This week in health class we continued to explore the qualties that help us develop resilience by learning about our brain and how incredible it is. We discussed that our brain helps us to experience the world through our senses, feelings and actions. We agreed how wonderful this is but, sometimes our brains can cause use some challenges when we get super angry, frustrated  or anxious. When this happens, we are not at our best and these types of emotions can intensify and cause us to temporarily lose control of our actions. We call this “flipping our lid”

We discussed that this is perfectly normal and helps to keep us safe from danger, but when we have these strong emotions, we are not always in danger resulting in us acting without thinking. Consequently this results in us getting more upset. 

 

We took the time to learn that there are three main parts of the brain using a hand model and that these parts are involved when we have big emotions. Below is the diagram that we used. 

 

We discussed that when we “flip our lid” our brains cannot have a healthy response to a problem and when this happens it is hard for us to communicate our needs and problem solve. As we continue our we will begin to discuss what we can do to keep a healthy balance and what useful tips we can do to help us become better at “keeping our lid on” 

 

In literacy this week we completed our biographies and revisited our lesson related to writing setting descriptions that uses imagery. We also had several mini-lessons to identify what a root word is as well as an introduction to prefixes and suffixes and “oi” “oy” vowel combination

 

In Math we have now brought our multiplication unit to a close. Continuing to help your child to use the strategies we have learned to develop our math fluency with multiplication facts up to 9x9 will be important. After spring break, we will be diving into division. 

 

Grade 3&4:

In February, our grade 3 and 4 students challenged themselves in their exploration of music. We integrated math into music by tackling skip counting songs that were both challenging and entertaining. Students demonstrated their musical abilities with boomwhackers, playing as a class ensemble while using all the notes in the C major scale. Additionally, they refined their skills in recognizing melodic direction through games and listening activities. The grade 3 and 4 students have made huge progress with this concept as they continue to tackle increasingly challenging melodies.