Dear Parents,

Today, we started off our day with silent reading/rug work time and reading another chapter of Castle in the Attic (we’ve been reading it for a long time, I know haha 🙂 ). The kids got very into it and wanted to hear what would happen next, but I left it on a cliffhanger. Then, I demonstrated estimating with decimals. I told the students that 0.2 and down rounds down and 0.3 and up rounds up just for ease to estimate the answer. We practiced a few on the board and practiced adding and subtracting tenths in two games: https://mrnussbaum.com/hotel-decimalfornia-online-game

and

https://mrnussbaum.com/decimals-of-the-caribbean-online-game

After snack and DPA we went to the library and students were challenged to match passages and book titles that teachers picked as their favourite quotes.

After lunch, we had Gym and played three types of dodgeball by the students’ choice. We played King’s Court, Doctor Dodgeball, and Elimination. After this, I showed the students a number of ads and we examined different features, persuasion tactics, and strategies that advertisers use to create effective ads. It was really fun having the students point out all of the elements of the ads and to examine the bias that companies have toward their products and how they make their product sell based on sometimes empty promises and withholding of information. Students wrote down in a chart some of the strategies used in the different ads and identified what was being sold and we also talked about the meaning of each ad.

At the end of the day, I showed students a video read-aloud of “My Fantastic, Elastic Brain”, a video about growth mindset. We talked about how growth mindset is believing that through practice, one can get better at a certain activity or skill. This is in comparison to a fixed mindset where one believes that they can never improve, which doesn’t benefit anybody. I explained that synapses are continuously created in our brains when we practice and things become easier and that we keep learning. We talked about how important open-mindedness is and having a positive attitude because if you have a negative attitude, you will likely not be as successful. We also talked about the importance of learning from our mistakes and how all inventors went through challenges and hard times but kept going and learned from their mistakes. It is an ongoing process of learning through our mistakes.

Then, students worked a bit more on their rugs.

Upcoming, we have a decimals Math quiz on Monday that students should be studying for.

Sincerely,

Ms. Wilks