Hi everyone,

It happened again... dance-parenting is taking over our lives! We missed last week's email because we were both at a dance competition just minutes away from Disneyland. Unfortunately, we were surrounded by rhinestones, hairspray, and loud music rather than Mickey, the scent of churros, and Pirates of the Caribbean. But hey… it’s all for the kids, right?

Here’s what’s happening in our planbook this week on the Top Floor.

Wrapping Up the American Revolution

We are finishing up our American Revolution unit, and it’s one of our favorite weeks of the whole study. On Monday, we’re heading to a farm in the mountains about an hour away where students will step back into colonial life. They’ll learn about daily life during the 1700s and even participate in a mock battle. It’s always an unforgettable experience.

Back in the classroom, students will also be creating Revolutionary War circle books. If you’ve never used circle books before, they are one of our favorite ways to turn research into a visual project. Students stack several circular pages together and each page focuses on a different piece of information about a topic. When the pages are glued together, each section is visible and easy to navigate. It ends up looking great and helps students organize their thinking while summarizing key information.

For this project, students choose four important battles from the Revolutionary War and summarize what happened, who was involved, and why the battle mattered. We pull the information for our summaries from our Revolutionary War Battles Reading Passages & Circle Book Project, which includes passages for 20 key battles.

Freebie of the Week

To make it easy for you to try this out in your own classroom, this week’s freebie is our circle book templates so you can create circle book projects with any topic you’re teaching.

Starting Our Next Novel Study: Flush

We are also beginning our next novel study: Flush by Carl Hiaasen. This is always one of the favorite novels of the year for many students. The story follows a boy who discovers that a local casino boat is dumping waste into the ocean and works to expose it.

It connects perfectly to our science unit on human impact on the environment, which makes for great cross-curricular conversations. Students quickly become invested in the mystery and the environmental message behind the story.

If you teach this novel, we use our Flush Novel Study which includes quizzes, vocabulary work, and chapter summaries to keep students accountable and help guide discussions.

Math Focus: Measurement Conversions

In math, we are working through converting measurements, and one of the biggest challenges students face is deciding whether to multiply or divide by the conversion rate.

The strategy that helps our students the most is writing the conversion in the same order as the question.

For example:

4 ft = ___ yd

Students write the relationship like this:

3 ft = 1 yd

Now they can see that to go from 3 to 1, they must divide by 3. Once they recognize that pattern, it becomes much easier to apply the same operation to the number in the problem.

4 ÷ 3 = 4/3 = 1 1/3 yd

This simple step helps students focus on the relationship rather than guessing which operation to use.

The key, of course, is lots of practice. We like to mix in games, puzzles, and different types of activities so students see the conversions repeatedly without it feeling repetitive. Our Comprehensive Measurement Conversions Bundle includes a huge collection of practice activities covering both the US customary and metric systems.

That’s everything happening on the Top Floor this week!

Thanks for being part of this community. We love getting to share what’s happening in our classrooms with all of you.

See you next week,

Joe and Quyen from Top Floor Teachers

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