New and Exciting Things are Happening

There have been some new and wonderful things happening in Mrs. Kolkebeck's classroom these past couple weeks. We now have a student teacher from Mizzou in the classroom who will be working with the children and begin teaching some subjects throughout the next couple months and assisting in all of the classroom activities. She is very excited to be working with us this semester and is looking forward to meeting all the parents of our brilliant chemists.

About Ms. Kropp
She is from St. Louis and has an Associates Arts in Teaching degree and is currently working on finishing up her bachelors degree in Elementary education at the University of Missoui. She loves being here at Benton and working with all the wonderful children here. She also loves cats.

Students have been investigating force and motion in science through research and experiments. More is to come on this!

We have been working hard on mastering our skills in multiplication and division and started a new math program called ST Math.

ST math is a new program that the district has began to implement district wide. This program is different from other math programs, such as Fast Math. ST Math stands for spacial temporal math, meaning that the program walks the students through different math skills while strictly using spacial temporal reasoning. Therefor, there are no directions given to the students through words only through images. We are excited to implement this program in our classroom because it challenges students to think differently about math as well as allowing students to display their knowledge and skills of mathematics in new ways. Our hopes are that this program will deepen our students' understanding in math. This program is available to use at home. If you and your student are interested in extra practice with ST Math we have sent home a flyer with information on how to log on to ST Math at home. If you did not receive the flyer please let us know and we would be happy to provide you that information!

This week we also had the pleasure of Slow Foods! Slow foods is a program were the students are able to learn about where our food comes from and are able to learn how to cook with the food of the month. This month we had a local chicken farmer come in and speak to the 3rd grade classes. They shared some very interesting information about where eggs come from and what work goes into harvesting eggs. They even brought in live chickens! We also cooked delicious scrambled eggs using eggs from the local farmer. It was a pretty tasty adventure!