How many of you have added the St. Louis Rams to your holiday card list?

Math: We began double bar graphs today. I posed an interesting question to them: Why are graphs important if you can get the same information from a table? Ask them tonight to see if they understood that graphs "visually present information/data in a way that you can see the numbers." Tonight's homework has them creating a double bar graph and interpreting the information.

As for the quiz last week...it should have come home Friday but in the event that you haven't seen it, please review it with your child, sign it, and have them file in their math sections. All week long I will be pulling groups to help construct a deeper understanding of how data is analyzed (mean, mode, median, and range).

Language Arts: As a whole group we discussed how many stories have a multitude of problems, yet the best readers are the ones who recognize the main problem and identify the solution that "matches" the problem. There will be many opportunities in the coming weeks where they'll be asked to explore a given story to determine the main problem/solution.

Bread and Jam for Frances - In preparation for their written response, they recorded notes on three different sticky notes that answer when and why Frances changed and what the change was...the prompt will ultimately be "Describe how Frances changed in the story." So many times a prompt like this is treated "lightly" but it is actually complex when you think about. That's my job - get them to think about the demands of the question.

Miss Rumphius - Similar to the Bread and Jam post above - however, the text is a bit more difficult to follow from the character trait perspective. It appears rather obvious but the root of the change is what her grandfather told her in the beginning - enjoy the beauty of the world but find a way to add some beauty on your behalf.

Trip to Freedom - A difficult read considering many of our students at Damascus have relatively little experience with leaving one country to come to another on a permanent basis. What I do see as a common understanding is how one would feel about leaving for another country and what would cause someone to want to leave. It's this mood that we will investigate over the next couple of days.

Word Study is due Friday!