Classroom Update From Mrs. McCrea

I have started into my first couple days of my three week teaching block.  I am very excited to see what the students can learn but also bring to our classroom and share their own knowledge and experiences with the classroom.  Here is an update on where we are within the subjects I will be teaching:

In English, we have started a new unit on Fairness. Students will be reading and viewing images, books, videos and biographies surrounding the theme of fairness.  Through this unit students will learn how to organize paragraphs and eventually organize and write their own biographies.  The end goal is that the students will be able to write a biography on someone who has fought for fairness.

In Math, we started a new unit that is called Understanding Numbers. This unit focuses on place value with large numbers (up to the millions), solving word problems, multiples, prime and composite numbers, factors, order of operations, and integers.

In Science, we are learning about Living Things.  Soon we will be starting an inquiry project in which the students will be choosing a living thing that they want to learn about. They will decide what information they want to learn through developing questions about that living thing and organizing how they are going to present their information.  We are practicing how to create good questions and our researching skills in the classroom.

In Health, we have discussed and defined values and personal standards.  Students have recently completed an assignment that challenged them to determine and uncover their values and then set their own personal standards for each of the 5 dimensions of the wellness (physical, psychosocial, social, spiritual and environmental).  We have also discussed that in our lives people face situations that will either challenge or reinforce our personal standards.  The students will create a skit of a situation that will challenge and then reinforce their personal standards.  In the situation that will challenge their personal standards, they have to resolve the challenge in a healthy way through the skit.