Hello 206 families and friends!
It’s hard to believe it’s already December—the days are flying by! Right before Thanksgiving break, students wrapped up their opinion essays about judging their collections. To celebrate, they created trophies and we held a special green carpet ceremony!
Students had a wonderful time sharing their collections and deciding which would earn the coveted trophy. They practiced giving clear reasons and evidence for their choices, just as they did in their writing. Check out the photos below!
In Everyday Math, we are wrapping up our second unit, which focused on prime and composite numbers, long division, how to interpret remainders, properties of triangles and the ever-challenging 4-4’s. As a class, we completed the Sieve of Eratosthenes—an ancient algorithm used to identify all prime numbers up to a given number. We applied it to the numbers up to 100, looked for patterns, and discussed divisibility rules to help us determine which numbers are prime.
A note from Mr. Zafeiris (math class on Tuesday and Thursday): This week in math we worked on geometry. More specifically, we learned strategies for finding the area and perimeter of irregular shapes, how to determine missing side lengths, and we also had an introduction to triangles and some of their properties. We will continue working extensively with geometry. The students are excellent and they truly enjoy math—especially geometry, which is a challenging unit because it requires seeing things from different perspectives.
In writing, we are diving into fractured fairy tales—a fun extension of our earlier discussions about folktales. Students selected a familiar fairy tale and are writing it from a completely new perspective. We read The Princess and the Pea, and I shared a former student’s version told from the point of view of the pea! We also watched a few fractured fairy tale videos, and students read the original stories before beginning their own creative retellings.
We now have a wonderful variety of tales in progress, including Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and even a creative twist on a classic nursery rhyme – Humpty Dumpty. As a class, we created a chart to organize everyone’s choices and the unique twists they plan to add.
To help prepare for our next class novel and an upcoming exploration after winter break, we learned about what many consider the first meme—surprisingly dating back to the early 1900s: “Kilroy was here.” We watched a short Weird History video about its origins (ask your student where it started!).
We discussed why certain images or phrases catch on and spread so widely. Now our classroom is filled with Kilroy drawings popping up in all sorts of unexpected places!
Our classroom service project, held in partnership with Ms. Anna’s class (before Thanksgiving) was a big success! Together, we hosted a food drive and collected nonperishable items such as canned and boxed goods to support families in need through the Des Plaines Food Pantry. Thank you for helping us make a meaningful difference in our community!
