Schaab Scholars: Great Minds Don't Think Alike

This week we are embarking on an amazing new adventure! The Schaab Scholars are participating in the Global Read Aloud. What is the Global Read Aloud? The mission of this project is simple, one book to connect students around the world! Over the next six weeks, we will be reading the book, Fish in a Tree, by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. Below, you can listen to the author read the first chapter. I'm very excited as a "newbie" to this project to share this book with the Schaab Scholars, and make global connections about what we are reading.

In other exciting news, The Schaab Scholars met their first SMART Goal! We reached over 1,000 Dojo points by October 1st. After doing some reflecting, we are now focusing on coming up with a new SMART goal for our class. We are now focusing on coming up with an academic SMART goal that we can all strive to meet. Hopefully, we'll have a new goal to share this week! We are also deciding as a class if we will reset our Dojo points to graph our progress. We were missing quite a few of the Schaab Scholars last week, and we want to make sure we have most people to weigh in on our decision. Stay tuned! Not only did we as a class meet our SMART goal, but many of the Schaab Scholars have started meeting goals as well! We've been conferencing with each other about our progress, and providing each other suggestions for improving, refining, and making sure that all of our goals are truly SMART.

In writing we have been working on personal narratives. We have worked on sharing lots about ourselves through our writing while building our safe writing community. We are learning and practicing various strategies for brainstorming, sharing our work, and building our writing stamina. We love reading books to help model what a strong writer does before writing on our own. We also are reading books on our "passion project" topics. We are aiming to have our guiding questions in the next week or two. I can't wait to share some of the amazing ideas that are building!

In Reading, we have jumped into our our Daily 5 structure and are becoming more successful with independent work. We have short mini lessons together as a class, then go into our Daily 5 activities. Students are also meeting with Mrs. Schaab during the week for smaller guided lessons to meet each group's needs. Below you can see some pictures of us practicing our robust vocabulary words.

Show me "glared".

Show me "stunned".

Your Scholar may have told you that we took our pretest for Chapter 3 in Math early last week, and then started our new math groups. To help keep track of what each class has for homework, please check the link on our Assignment Notebook page. In Room 217, we are breaking apart Chapter 3 by each standard, and focusing on the ones we struggled with on the pretest. Last week, we spent Friday decomposing numbers to find their factors.