Reading: In Reading, we talked about an author's purpose when writing nonfiction books and how to infer an author's point of view. We read the book, Earthquakes! by Cy Armour during shared reading and students practiced our focus skills with books assigned to them at their level in Epic. Math: In Math, we continued working on addition and subtraction with bigger numbers. Students practiced the partial sums and standard algorithm for addition. They also worked on using base ten blocks to add and subtract. Writing: In writing, students are all almost finished publishing their reviews. Some even decided to type them to get prepared for sharing time. Students will be presenting their work this coming week with other grades. Science: In science, students reflected on their work with plate tectonics and uploaded their work into Seesaw.
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Reading: In Reading, we read the book Save Water and talked about text features and finding the main idea of every chapter. Students practiced this skill with their own reading during literacy centers. Finding the main idea of a nonfiction text is a skill most students struggle with, so we will continue to work on this in the days to come. We also participated in all the book week events were students got to read to animals, listen to reading in multiple languages and hear from a notable author. Math: In Math, we started our new unit on adding and subtracting with bigger numbers. We learned strategies to use when adding more than one addend and students practiced this through story problems and games. Writing: In writing, we are finishing our writing of reviews. Most students are in the editing/ publishing phase and are getting prepared to share their final piece. Science: In science we continued our learning of plate tectonics and how they help in shaping the surface of the Earth. Students participated in an activity I like to call "Plate Tectonics". Food always makes everything better! Through this activity students learned about convergent, divergent and transform plate boundaries with oceanic and continental plates. We had fruit roll ups representing our oceanic plates and Lotus crackers representing our continental plates. Marshmallow frosting was used to represent the upper layer of the Earth's mantle. Students agreed it was one of the most delicious lessons this year! Reading: In Reading, we talked about what readers do after nonfiction. Students practiced summarizing small sections of nonfiction texts and writing dow facts they they learned. We also continued to look into strategies for solving new or tricky words. Math: In Math, we started learning about 3-D shapes. Students identified characteristics of solids and learned about faces, edges and vertices of solids. We ended the week makin different kinds of pyramids with straws and clay. Writing: In writing, we continued with our opinion writing. Students wrote about the reasons they had their opinion on the topic they chose to write about. We paracticed adding a lot of details and explanations to opinion writing. Students are encouraged to continue practicing opinion writng in their weekend journals. Social Studies: In social studies we studied culture and different components of culture. We talked about how culture changes throughout history and students got to read about many different cultures around the world. Reading: In Reading, we continued reading nonfiction books and learning strategies readers use before, during,and after reading. We read books that involved the sequence or cycle of something. Books we read were From Tadpole to Frog and From Cocoa Beans to Chocolate. Students demonstrated understanding of sequencing in nonfiction books. Math: In Math, we continued working with Geometrical shapes. Students practiced identifying shapes by playing Geo-Bands! Students had a lot of fun trying to guess their mystery shape. Writing: In writing, we continued with our opinion writing. Students wrote an introduction to capture their readers and started writing a paragraph with background information to keep their readers informed about their topic. We practiced giving background information using the 5 senses. Science:In science, we continued to learn about Earth's layers and introduced tectonic plates. Students created a craftivity display of the layers of the earth and practiced their knowledge of the continents and oceans. Reading: In Reading, we started our new unit on nonfiction. Students learned a nonfiction pre-reading routine while reading our book, Black Widow Spiders during shared reading. We also learned about strategies readers use whlie reading nonfiction. Math: In Math, we started our new Geometry unit. Students learned about line segments and other vocabulary associated with lines. Students practiced making parallel lines during math rotations. Writing: In writing, we started our unit on opinion writing. Students reviewed the definition of opinion and brainstormed ideas for their first writing assignment: writing a review. Students were exposed to many examples of reviews to get an understanding of what a review is. Students also started their graphic organizers for their own reviews on a topic. Science:In science, we started our unit on Earth Science. Students began the unit by doing what scientists do and asking a lot of questions about phenomena that occurs on our Earth. Students learned about the layers of the Earth and will continue to explore how these layers affect the changes that occur on Earth. Reading: In Reading this week, we talked about how characters' character traits can change throughout the story and how sometimes the authors wants us to learn a lesson from the story. We read Mela and The Elephant as a read-aloud, and students were able to figure out difficult words using context clues, make inferences about Mela's character traits and keep track of the lesson or moral of the story. Students practiced these strategies during literacy centers as well. Math: In Math, students learned many strategies for the addition of multi-digit numbers. Students explored place value by modeling addition with base ten blocks. There also saw how place value can also be seen with the partial sums method for addition. Lastly, students were able to explain how the standard method of addition works. Writing: In writing, we continued with our nonfiction writing unit. Students started revising and editing their books with peers and a teacher using a rubric. Students understood that this stage in writing is important because it gives authors an opportunity to have their books read by different sets of eyes. Science:In social studies we reviewed needs and wants and how they apply to Pheonixville, but also real life. We talked about pros and cons of living in certain areas of our map. Students added their houses to our Pheonixville map after choosing which side they would live on. Students were a ble to explain why they chose the side they chose. Reading: In Reading this week, we continued to work on character traits and making inferences about character traits based off of what characters say and do. We finished Houndsley and Catina and learned how to retell the story using big character emotions. Math: In Math, we started working with two digit addition problems. Students shared strategies they already have for solving two digit addition problems. We related the math to shopping where students had a chance to work with money and pretend being the clerk and the cashier. We also learned a new term, ballpark estimate. Students enjoyed figuring out whether their answers were reasonable using a ballpark estimate. Writing: In writing, we continued with our nonfiction writing unit. Students started looking for pictures to add to their nonfiction stories. While many students were still working on their rough drafts, some started looking over each other's work to revise and edit. Science:In science, students finished their seed dispersal models. We had a discussion on the challenges and benefits of working collaboratively with a group. Students were able to identify things that went well and things they will do differently next time we have an engineering design challenge. Students happily presented their models to their classmates! Reading: In Reading this week we learned about character traits we could use to describe characters. Students were able to make inferences about traits that describe characters and provide evidence for their inference. We started a new book for read aloud titled Houndsley and Catina. During Literacy Centers, students practiced the comprehension skills of using context to solve tricky words and making inferences. Math: In Math, we continued working with number stories, especially those dealing with money. Students also learned strategies for adding two digit numbers mentally. Writing: In writing, we continued with our nonfiction writing unit. Students added a conclusion and a glossary to their writing and used strategies to add more details. Science: In science, students started their first enginnering design challenge of the year. They took what they learned from last week about seed dispersion to brainstorm, plan, design, and create a seed dispersing design of their own. We had to talk about collaboration before students got to work, and they did an amazing job for it being their first design challenge! Reading: In Reading this week we talked about using pictures and text to make inferences. We finished reading Days With Frog and Toad and talked about the similiarities and differences with Frog and Toad All Year. Students practiced their reading fluency and making inferences during literacy centers. Math: In Math, we started our new unit on addition and subtraction. Our focus this week was on "change to more" number stories and "part-part-total" number stories. Toward the end of the week we talked about temperature and practicing "change to more" number stories with changes in temperature. Writing: In writing, we continued with our nonfiction writing unit. Students started writing the middle of their books. We talked about adding adjectives, comparisons, adverbs, and transition words to their writing. Science : Our focus question in science this week was "How are seeds dispersed in nature?" Students learned about the different ways seeds are dispersed such as through wind, water, animal fur and digestion, gravity, explosion, and many more. Students worked with a group to create a poster that displays the methods we discussed in class. Reading: In Reading, started Days With Frog and Toad as our read aloud. Students learned they can make great predictions with books that have familiar characters. We learned the skill of having evidence for predictions and students practiced the skill during literacy centers/teacher time. Lastly, students worked on their reading fluency and making sure it matches what is going on in the story.
Math: In Math, we finished off the unit with coin combinations and learning how to make change. Students learned strategies for making change such as the "Add up" strategy. Students finished off the week with the Unit 3 test. Tests will be given to the students next week after uploading results to Seesaw. Writing: In writing, we continued with our nonfiction writing unit. Students have learned ways to organize their writing using a table of contents. Students also wrote the introduction to their nonfiction books. Some students also started writing the middle of their books. Social Studies : This week we returned to our classroom town project for social studies. We talked about wants vs. needs and how we will meet our needs as explorers in a new land. Students identified resources we have in our land and the uses we have for the resources. We also planned what our first homes will look like and voted for our classroom town name. After counting the votes, our classroom town will be named Pheonixville! |
Hello!Here you will find weekly updates on student activities throughout the past week. I will update this page every weekend after a given week. Archives
May 2019
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