This week, we continued exploring our central idea: Understanding how our body systems work helps us make informed choices about our wellbeing. Students strengthened their understanding of how different systems work together and why this knowledge empowers them to make healthier choices. They shared prior knowledge, asked thoughtful questions, and made meaningful connections to their own lives.
During UOI time, we also dedicated practice sessions to our upcoming assembly. I’m incredibly proud of the students’ confidence, teamwork, and growing ability to speak clearly and interact with one another. With continued practice, I’m hopeful that even more students will feel ready to participate actively in our next assembly.
Mathematics: Expanding Addition Strategies
We revisited all the addition strategies students have learned so far, helping them see that mathematicians choose strategies flexibly depending on the numbers they’re working with. Here are expanded ideas you can include:
- Place‑value strategy — Breaking numbers into hundreds, tens, and ones to make addition clearer.
- Number line jumps — Using open number lines to add in friendly chunks.
- Friendly numbers — Adjusting numbers to make them easier to work with (e.g., rounding to the nearest ten).
- Compensation — Shifting value from one number to another to simplify the sum.
- Base‑ten blocks — Visualizing regrouping and addition concretely.
- Expanded form — Adding each place value separately before combining the total.
- Vertical algorithm — Practicing clear alignment and regrouping.
In addition to reviewing these strategies, students learned and practiced the break‑apart strategy to find the sum of two three‑digit numbers. This helped them see how decomposing numbers makes large addition more manageable and builds confidence with 3‑digit operations.
In literacy, students focused on both writing and comprehension:
- They practiced writing a Burger Paragraph, learning how to structure a clear topic sentence, supporting details, and a concluding sentence. If you want, I can help you create Burger Paragraph anchor charts or student sentence frames.
- Students reviewed how to identify the main idea in a passage, using clues from the title, repeated words, and supporting details.
- We explored non‑fiction books about the human body, helping students connect literacy skills to our UOI and build background knowledge before transitioning into the next unit.
