Another week coming to an end!  This will be a short post since it feels like a short week, and I will be seeing all of you at conferences in the next 2 weeks.  We had a lovely time at our school hike on Tuesday, and it was incredibly helpful to have some parent volunteers!  Wednesdays's delay made for a short day, but wearing pajamas and having stuffed animals was special and reminded me, once again, how little the students really are!  Today's tree study trip was wonderfully instructive (thank you Josh!) and we had a beautiful day for it. Again, thanks to the parents who make this kind of trip possible. 

On to academics -- Math in 4th grade has switched to data and measurement, a short and fun unit all about making line plots and noticing the "shape of the data." 3rd graders are continuing to work on multiplication and division, using what they know to figure out what they don't know. I'll give more details of these units and concepts during conferences.

We are busily writing either small moment stories (3rd grade) or fiction stories (4th grade) and learning how to paint images with our words, how to think about beginning, middle and end, and how to make sure our characters seem real. This class loves to write, and I am enjoying reading their work and conferring with them individually. 

They also love to read! Be sure to ask them about Rob and Sistine, the characters in our read-aloud, Tiger Rising. They are doing some heavy thinking about who they are more like. They are also learning that characters in books, like real humans, are complicated and don't just have one character trait. 

Finally, we are learning a lot about Vermont and its geography. Today we examined population maps, precipitation maps, relief maps, and elevation maps.  Next week we will get into the various "physiographic" regions of Vermont and think about what Vermont is famous for and why.  We will end this unit by making fun candy maps of Vermont right around Halloween.

We start our bread making on Monday.  A word of warning -- this bread is made by kids so it sometimes doesn't come out perfectly.... Please don't count on it as your main dinner!  Most days it is perfect. but there are those times....

Next week's sharing theme is "something from another country."

Enjoy your weekend, and I will see you all soon!