February 4, 2017

Mrs. Brutcher's Winter Newsletter 

BIG IDEA: ADAPTATION

Enduring Understanding: Actions Have Consequences
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​Essential Questions: What causes war and what are the consequences?
How is our planet evolving over time? 

Actions Have Consequences
To integrate our big idea of actions having consequences, students wrote New Year's Resolutions to show how their actions can have positive consequences on their lives. Students worked in cooperative groups to identify specific ways they could show each of our Core Values. Then the students identified areas that they individually wanted to improve upon and tied their goal to the appropriate Core Value. Students had to identify their personal goals and create a plan to help them reach their goal.

Frampton Plantation Field Trip

Holiday Celebrations

​Empty Bowls & Stop Hunger Now

"Litter Trashes Everything" Puppet Show

​ We VOTED! 

​Challenge Island Field Trip

​Portfolio Night 

​Math

Our essential questions that we have been exploring in Math are What does multiplication and division mean?, What is the importance of patterns in learning multiplication and division?, What strategies can be used to learn multiplication and division facts? and How can multiplication and division facts with smaller numbers be applied to larger numbers?  Students are also now applying their knowledge of multiplication and division to properties and equations. We stress that using models to represent these operations will help students more easily solve problems that require abstract reasoning.

Social Studies

  Students have been connecting our Big Idea: Adaptation and our enduring Understanding: Change is inevitable, nothing ever stays the same and Actions have Consequences to our study of South Carolina history. We’ve looked closely at our essential questions such as: How did war change the lives of slaves on South Carolina Plantations?., What role did the Confederate submarine, the H.L. Hanley  had on the Civil War?, How did reconstruction affect South Carolina? and How did the Cotton Mills help keep people afloat after war? As we continued to study the Civil War, we took a field trip to Frampton Plantation. Students were able to  see first hand the confederate and union uniforms, the horses’ role during war, the types of weapons and how they were fired, different types of furs and what they were used for, and a relic of the Hunley. When students returned they sketched, labeled and created their own Hunley and explained how it impacted the Civil War. Recently we analyzed photos of mills and mill workers, ads and newspaper articles on Cotton Mills. Students were able to choose an activity such as: creating their own child labor schedules, making a persuasive poster convincing people to come work in the mills or integrate writing by analyzing a picture of mill workers and producing an informative, entertaining or persuasive (author’s purpose) writing piece.

Science

This semester our science unit focused on Earth and Space.
We started out learning about the history of technology and inventions from when pottery was invented to when electricity was discovered and to today’s human genome and space shuttle! 

We then explored our planet and talked about the 3 categories of rocks and their cycles. Our students were fascinated by the different layers found beneath our feet, unleashing plate tectonics, mountains, volcano eruptions and earthquakes. 

The important role erosion plays on our planet led us to talk about the weather and its consequences in our lives. 
We also learned about the history of astronomy including why we have seasons and how the phases of the moon work.

Understanding what our solar system is made of and how it functions was key to a better understanding of what our galaxy, called the Milky Way, is and it also helped us realize how insignificant we are among billions of other galaxies within an ever expending universe.

These lessons were all supported with videos and hands-on experiments.

ELA

  In Writing, we have been focusing on persuasive writing. We learned how to state our opinions and provide reasons and examples to support our opinions. We have been using the CUPS strategy to edit our own work and peer edit other’s work by checking for capitals, noun and verb usage, punctuation, and spelling. We have also been learning how to form and support opinions with nonfiction texts. We are able to use actions and dialogue from text to support our opinions. 
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In ELA, we have continued our small guided reading groups. Groups have focused on CAFE strategies to improve their Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and to Expand their vocabulary. Specific reading strategies we have focused on include identifying the main idea of texts while providing supportive details, retelling texts,  making inferences, comparing and contrasting characters, analyzing how characters change overtime and identifying internal and external character traits,