I apologize for the delay in updates! The past few weeks have been very busy and I am still getting back into the routine of posting updates on here.
Reader's Workshop During the last few weeks of reader's workshop, we have had debates, learned how to annotate texts, and came up with new ideas about argumentative texts to help us understand our issues better. Then, we identified certain techniques that authors of opinion writing use to achieve specific goals. We also identified perspective and talked about how that can change the message of the writing and worked on strategies to use when texts become more difficult. Writer's Workshop When we got back from our three-day weekend, Mrs. Prouse wrote us a reply to our chocolate milk letters, urging us to dive deeper into the issue. Over the last 2 weeks, we worked on connecting different articles to support a common reason, how to write effective introductions and conclusions, and acknowledging counterclaims to help our own arguments. We also learned to deliberately choose pieces of evidence that are the most effective and how to sway an audience by appealing to things they would care about. Math We finished up our decimal unit and we are now onto fractions! The past week, we started learning about fraction strips, estimating fractions, and finding prime factors. This fraction unit will be much longer than others so we will be working with fractions for a while. Social Studies Ms. Wu completed the science unit about chemistry and this is her summary of what the students did last week: We started our next unit- Chemical Magic. The lessons in this unit all revolve around chemical reactions. The kids had a really fun time learning and doing the activities in this unit. They learned a lot of new vocabulary, including particles, dissolving, reactions, acids, and gases. The students brought home a review packet over the weekend, and we went over it in class. Extras We continued our interpretive dance unit in P.E. with Coach Mitchell and music with Ms. Mesch. Our music performance will be Thursday, April 9 at 9:20 and another show at 10:30. Come watch the students perform all the songs they've learned this year! We are also learning a lot about grammar. We have finished simple sentences and compound sentences and are now learning about complex sentences. Ms. Wu is also teaching them spelling so they are really tackling many disciplines.
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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! 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. Reader's Workshop
Reader's workshop this week was very challenging and really pushed us to stretch our thinking about reading. We started off the week looking at Webb's Depth of Knowledge questions and used that to guide our research. After that, we practiced synthesizing across different texts and identifying subtopics that are common in different texts about the same topic. As we wrote about our reading, we learned that readers have to shift from those larger subtopics to the smaller details that support them. Using all of this information, we can compare and contrast our research and look at what specific craft moves the authors make. Finally, we ended the week by thinking about what the author is trying to tell us, identifying their perspective and how that changes our thinking. Writer's Workshop We finished up our research reports by starting the week learning about introductions and conclusions. We learned a few different ways that we can start or end our reports and what we want to leave our reader with. Then, we learned that sometimes research reports have patterns to help create cohesion within the report. We want our writing to sound connected about one topic so we can do that by writing various text features in similar ways. After this, we revised and edited our reports and turned them in. Math This week was all about solving problems in different ways. We learned how to solve multiplication problems using both a diagram and a model. Then, we learned two ways to solve multiplication problems involving two decimals. We have one more lesson to go before our test on Wednesday. Science We got to continue our science unit this week by modeling the water cycle. We used both hot and cold water to help us figure out what conditions cause the most rain and why we have clouds in the sky. We also learned a little about hurricanes and tried to save a town by building various structures to avoid water damage. The big concept we learned about was constraints and how this keeps people in the real world from solving problems. This unit was very short and we have already finished the content. The science test will be on Tuesday. Social Studies Social studies this week was all about conflicts (again). We learned about different ways Native American people were forced off of their lands and about different conflicts that occurred between Native American groups. We have one more lesson about the key people during this time period and we will review all of these conflicts together by having a few debates. Our social studies test will be on Thursday. Extras We continued P.E. with Coach Mitchell and had music with Ms. Mesch. This week, we also had art with Mrs. Fish and we got to finish our street art paintings from the class before. The Holiday Fair was also this week. Thank you so much to all the families that donated or helped out with that. The kids loved it and appreciated all the hard work. I hope everyone had a restful Thanksgiving break! Between now and winter break, we have a lot of material to get through so I warned the students to be prepared. Reader's Workshop We jumped right back into our nonfiction unit and they are starting to focus on one topic to read about. They will use the information they gather about their topic to teach the rest of the class about it. Everyone has some sort of science topic that they will be sharing with us. This week, we focused on choosing a topic and thinking of some sort of question that will guide our research. Our questions help us think deeper about our topic and cannot be answered in one sentence. We want to synthesize the information we gather to answer our questions. Writer's Workshop It was a little harder for them to get back into their research reports but eventually, they remembered where they left off. This week, we talked about adding more information to sentences we already have by using commas, dashes, and parentheses. We also looked at different types of structures that our writing could resemble. Finally, we discussed different text features that are usually present in nonfiction writing and how we can add some of those features to our own writing. We will finish our research reports by the end of next week! This is exciting and I'm sure the class will be happy with their final product. Math The next math chapter is about multiplying decimals. Based on the pre-assessments, we thought that everyone could use some review on how to do this so the math classes are not split up this time. This week, we talked about how to multiply decimals with single-digit whole numbers and double-digit whole numbers. We also looked at place-value patterns and how those help us when working with decimals. We learned four different strategies for multiplying: place-value patterns, partial products, the area model, and using the distributive property to split up some numbers. Next week, we will learn how to solve word problems and work on multiplying two decimals together. Science We started the next unit of science on Monday! Continuing with Earth science, we are diving in to learn about water on our planet. In our first lesson, we investigated how much salt water vs. fresh water there is on Earth. Then, on Friday, we learned what an aquifer is and how they are another source of freshwater underground. We spent some time trying to figure out the best spot to dig a well based on certain clues about the environment and landscape. Next week, we will have 2 more lessons about water on Earth and will take the test the following week. Social Studies We are busting through so much content, we even finished three social studies lessons this week. Before the break, we learned about different explorers and how America was discovered by Europeans. In this next unit, we are learning about interactions between the Native Americans that were already here and the Europeans. Some were positive engagements and some were not so great. Next week, we will learn a little more about the negative side of colonization. Extras Even though it has been a rainy week, we were still able to have P.E. outdoors with Coach Mitchell and we had music with Ms. Mesch. There was no art class with Mrs. Fish but we did do some art in our class. Since it's December, we made some snowflakes to get into the winter mood. They were a little confused on how to construct it, but they all made beautiful snowflakes in the end. We also started something new for this trimester: a homework/ classwork chart. If the students turn everything in on time, they will get a stamp at the end of the week and if they get stamps for all 12 weeks, we will have a special party with a treat of their choosing. They seemed pretty excited about this so we will see if this helps them complete their work. I am hoping this will motivate them to be more responsible and prepare them to be organized and self-sufficient next year at middle school. In addition to this, we are also doing more explicit grammar teaching. From their narrative writing and the first draft of their research reports, it is clear that many of them need some instruction in this.
I am very proud of all the work they did this week, especially after the break. We have been able to complete everything on time and they are putting a lot of effort in. Thank you! |
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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