Reader's Workshop Our book club conversations have been getting deeper and are becoming more in depth. This week, we learned how to have debates about books and used an example video to answer the question: How can we make our book club conversations the most effective they can be? On Friday, we practiced our book club conversations and each book club decided on one theme that they could find throughout their book. Writer's Workshop We are getting to the end of our narrative unit and the students are working hard to finish up their last stories. This week, we started looking at a mentor text to help us get some ideas and see a model for different strategies. The mentor text we are using is a short story called Eleven by Sandra Cisneros. From this text, we saw examples of stretching tension out and including actions that cause emotion. Math We started chapter 2 this week, which is all about division. First, we modeled division using base-10 blocks and counters. Then, we worked on long division and the underlying concepts on why it works. Using our models from the first day, we could figure out which place value to put the first digit of the quotient in. Extras As always, we had P.E. with Coach Mitchell this week but there was a sub for music. For art this week, our very own "Miss Safa" taught the students how to draw a whale and the results were great! We also had a special assembly called "Happy to Be Healthy" and we learned about how different types of foods affect our bodies. In addition to all of these things, we had a fun cooking "design challenge". The students took an original cookie recipe and changed it to add more of what they wanted. In groups, they made the dough and we baked them. After, we taste-tested the original recipe compared to theirs. We also found the average scores for taste, texture, and chocolate-to-dough ratio. Next Step Recommendations
After the students complete their reading for their reading logs, have them make a journal entry. We want them to be finding deeper meaning than what's at the surface level. To help with math, try giving the students various objects to put into equal groups. We want to practice modeling different division problems so it is easier to understand the actual math concepts, rather than the formulas.
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Reader's Workshop
This week we finally launched our Literature Book Clubs! The students met with their group members to create a group constitution and discuss the books they are reading. Each group has their own book that is around their reading level. For the next few weeks, they will meet to discuss their books at length to develop themes and craft moves the authors make. Writer's Workshop We finished up our first narratives this week and got to type them up and submit them through Google Classroom. To start off the week, we worked on conclusions to be able to leave our reader with something at the end, then used a checklist to make sure our narratives had all the elements that make our writing strong. Math Chapter one was completed this week and the students worked very hard on all the assessments that were thrown at them. Next week we will be starting chapter two, which is all about dividing whole numbers. On Thursday, we took a pre-assessment to gauge our prior knowledge on this topic as we get ready for the next chapter. Extras We continued with P.E. and music as usual this week but we also got to start art with Ms. Fish! The students had fun practicing their line work by drawing shoes on Wednesday. We also had an assembly with author Kathryn Otoshi and got to listen to her stories that speak on different social issues that are faced by children. Finally, we got to vote for our representatives for student leadership on Thursday. Congratulations to Rhea, Rayna, and Mishu for being elected as our first trimester student leadership representatives! Next Step Recommendations If your child is reading their book club book at home, encourage them to write journal entries and think analytically about their books. We are practicing finding meaning where might be hidden so any journal entry about something they find interesting could be helpful later on. Also, we are about to start a new chapter on dividing so it would be very helpful if the students knew their times table facts because it will help with automaticity in this chapter. To help them practice, have them help you group objects evenly (this can be money, food, toys, etc.) then, make the groups bigger. We are going to end up dividing by double digit numbers and it seems that many students had trouble with that on Thursday. Reader's Workshop Continuing on with our unit on thinking deeply about texts, we started off the week considering different perspectives of our books. We identified the main perspective(s) that our books were told from and asked ourselves how the book would change if it were told from different perspectives. Then, we thought analytically about our books and used a few prompted questions to rank different events from the book in order of importance. Using these events, we could make comparisons and dive deeper into our books. After all of this work thinking about our texts, we used what we knew about good writing about reading to revise our own journal entries about our books to support our ideas and use evidence. Writer's Workshop In writer's workshop, we continued our work on personal narratives. Using what we know about story arcs, we incorporated those ideas to "arc" our own narratives and see what events fit into the general structure of a story. From the arcs, we identified the climax, or the most important part and worked on how to emphasize it. To demonstrate, the students got to practice on a piece of writing I did about my relationship with my sister. They helped me by offering suggestions on how to make my climax pop. The final lesson this week was on adding flashbacks or flash-forwards to take our readers through time. Math We are very close to the end of chapter one and the students worked hard this week to get through five lessons! These included multiplying by two-digit numbers, dividing by splitting the dividend into smaller numbers, word problems, numerical expressions, and learning the order of operations. I was very impressed with the hard work the students put in this week to learn five different topics. Science We took a break from learning new information this week and completed a fun project to review all we've learned so far. Working with Ms. Wu's class, we got to make iMovies acting as newscasters to explain the different concepts that we learned.
After coming back from the three-day weekend, it seemed like everyone was rested and ready to go. Here's what we did this week:
Reader's Workshop This week we continued with the idea of thinking deeply about our books. After doing the journal entries last week, we started the week by focusing on the fact that we will be writing about what we are reading so we read differently to make sure our journal entries contain thoughts that have meaning. To continue through this lens in the next lesson, we chose one main idea about the book and looked for different places the text supports the idea. The students had the chance to practice these strategies throughout the week. Writer's Workshop We have been working hard on our narrative drafts so far so we started off the week by looking at a checklist to see what we need to work on and make some goals for the future. In the next session, we moved on from generating ideas for stories and decided on one story that we want to work on and develop for the next few weeks. We drafted a quick first draft of the story so we could work using that in the future. To end this week, we tried a more complex lesson of figuring out what our stories are really about. We tried to see what underlying messages are present in our stories and write them differently so those messages are apparent throughout the whole piece. Math To continue in chapter one of math, we started off using "basic facts" with powers of ten to solve multiplication problems. This relates to the previous lessons about powers of ten and place value. We also completed a mid-chapter checkpoint to see what concepts we still need to work on. After this, we got more practice multiplying by one-digit numbers using the standard algorithm. On Friday, we took a break from the regular math lessons and completed a "math task" to figure out how many pennies were in a collection given certain parameters; this helped with the concept of multiples. Science When we got back, we finished up our sun dial lesson from last Friday. We learned how sun dials are made and why they work. Then, we took a look at why we have certain seasons and how the position of the sun can tell us what season it is. After the lesson, we looked at some different photos to determine when the photos were taken. Extras We had P.E. with Coach Mitchell and music with Ms. Mesch as always. Since we do not start art for a few more weeks, we did a different art project exploring dimension and how to make a 2-D picture look 3-D. We also got another visit from our friends at Soul Shoppe and they helped us explore our feelings and gave us suggestions for how to effectively handle them. Next Step Recommendations After your child reads their book(s) each day, ask them to tell you one concept or theme that they got from the part they read; this will help with our reading unit. To make math easier, make sure your child knows the times table- the faster they know these facts, the easier it will be for the remainder of this chapter. You could also give them other multiplication problems that require them to regroup. In relation to science, try showing your child old pictures of yourself outside and have them guess what season it was based on the sun's position or shadows. (Apologies for the lack of pictures this week, it was hard to find time to snap them!) |
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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