Reader's Workshop
Continuing with our opinion unit, we started off this week by becoming experts on our topics and researching any background information we may need to effectively make an argument. Even sources that we may not think would relate to our topic may help us by giving us more details to use in support of our claims. Then, we talked about how we can make our group discussions more effective in growing ideas about the topic. If we talk about the same things every time we meet, we would be having the same conversation over and over again. To go along with this, the next day, we learned about adding our own ideas to what we are reading. We wrote down any questions or connections we had with the articles and texts we read about our topics. This will help us as we get further in the unit and are expected to synthesize evidence we read. Finally, we finished off the week by learning how to write effective summaries about texts that are about our topics. Good summaries of arguments capture all the main points as well as the main claim the author is trying to make. We should be able to summarize in our own words without changing the meaning of what the author is saying. Writer's Workshop This week, we finished up our first drafts of our argument essays: should schools ban chocolate milk? We started the week off by discovering what makes quotations powerful and why we should include them as evidence in addition to other types. After we came up with some good ideas, we tried adding quotes to our own writing and then, redrafted to include more evidence. Once the redrafted arguments were started, we moved on to adding analysis to our evidence. For each piece of evidence we included, we added analysis to it to strengthen our argument and explain how the evidence relates to our claim. On Thursday, we put the final touches on our drafts and they were sent to Mrs. Prouse so she can read them and respond! Math To start off our week in math, we learned how to divide decimals by whole numbers using long division. Because we learned long division in the beginning of the year, most of the students seemed to feel comfortable with this concept. The harder part came towards the end of the week: modeling. We learned how to model dividing decimals by other decimals and I am very proud of the students for taking the time to draw their models well. Once we finished this strategy, we learned two new strategies for dividing decimals by decimals by multiplying both numbers by 1 (or 10/10) to move the decimal point. This week, we will finish chapter 5 and take our math test on Friday. Social Studies Ms. Wu continued with this unit of social studies and this is her summary of what the students did this week: The students finished up their unit on "Life in the Colonies" and learned about systems that developed in the colonies, the role of slavery in colonial America, and what brought on deocratic ideas in colonial America. We had many great discussions about causes and effects of slavery and also democracy. The social studies test will be on Tuesday (when we get back from the 3-day weekend!) so all students should study the notes and review the book for the test. Extras In P.E. this week, Coach Mitchell is starting a dance unit with the students and they are learning different choreography. The students also had music with Ms. Mesch and art with Mrs. Fish this week. In art, the students are making pop art self portraits and will continue this project the next time we have art. In grammar, we learned about simple sentences this week and what makes a sentence simple. We also had another Soulshoppe workshop with Jules on Friday and we learned how to work out our feelings with friends. Finally, we had our second student leadership elections Friday afternoon. Congratulations Emme, Solomon, and Kara on becoming our new student leaders!
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Welcome back to school! I hope everyone had a restful holiday break. Thank you so much for the gifts and cards; they meant a lot to me. The kids are still warming up to being back in school but we had to keep going.
Writer's Workshop
We are also starting our opinion writing unit to go along with the reading unit. Our school is trying to decide if we should keep chocolate milk or not and we started off by weighing the pros and cons to having chocolate milk at school. We read multiple articles to try and get a good sense of both sides and decided individually what we think. After this, we started writing our first argument draft and talked about the structure of an argument essay. Once we had a first draft of our writing, we moved on to learn about the importance of including evidence that is found in outside sources, rather than just from our own minds. We will continue to improve our chocolate milk argument essays for a couple more weeks to make sure they are persuasive and professional. Math After finishing the last chapter on multiplying decimals, we are now moving on to dividing decimals. We started by learning place value patterns that can be found in division problems then moved on to learning how to visually represent division with decimals. The students came up with various ways to do this and they posted their work on Seesaw. Finally, we ended the week by estimating the quotient of division problems involving decimals before we do the work of actually dividing the decimals. Next week, we will start getting into more complex division. Social Studies Ms. Wu is now teaching the students social studies and science as we are trying something new. This week, they started learning about life in the colonies and how the colonies were formed. This new chapter is a long one so there will be a lot of information to learn. Extras P.E. and music started again on the normal schedule. This week, we got to do something new and exciting: a 3-D printing design challenge! Mr. Workman and a parent volunteer came to help the students be the first ones to use the Blue Hills 3-D printer. The challenge was to design a boat that would float and be able to hold a lego man in safely. The kids worked hard to design it in groups and the products will be printed over the course of the next week. |
AuthorUpdates on the class will occur regularly and you can check back here to see what's happening at school. Archives
March 2020
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