This Week...

September 16- September 20, 2019

Reading:  We continued working on making strong connections to various texts.  Students read a National Geographic article about tortoises on the Galapagos Islands, as well as an article from Zoobooks about animals that travel incredible distances.  They made great personal connections and were able to participate in meaningful discussions with their peers.  Another main focus was choosing just-right books and setting goals for reading workshop time.

Reading Logs are due Monday, September 23.  (100 minutes)

Math:  We dove right into chapter 2!  Students learned two mental math strategies for addition: “add the tens, then add the ones” and “add the tens, then subtract the extra ones”.  They utilized number bonds to help them with these strategies.  They also learned other mental math strategies for subtraction and addition problems with large numbers.  Our next focus will be on rounding!

Science:  At the beginning of the week, students analyzed weather patterns for an eight-day period.  They created line plot graphs to display information for wind speed, precipitation, and temperature.  We also collected weather data for different cities across the United States.

Writing:  In writing, students enjoyed a chapter from Tomie dePaola’s Things Will Never Be The Same.  They learned that authors draw on memories from their childhood to create stories.  Students had the opportunity to brainstorm a list of personal memories and use them to develop a writing piece.  They also worked on a quick write based on a sentence from a previous writing entry.  In grammar, students worked on differentiating between complete and incomplete sentences.  They learned that incomplete sentences are usually missing a subject or predicate.

Word Study:  Students focused on their high frequency word lists.  We will continue with buddy spelling next week.

Miscellaneous: On Monday, students did a great job during our hard lockdown drill.  We also finished our Flat Stanley letters!  Flat Stanley was sent on Thursday and is on his way to your friend/relative.  Thank you for all your help with this project…the students are so excited to learn about the various states!  Just a reminder, book orders are due on September 27^th and picture day is on Wednesday, September 25^th.  As always, please let me know if you have any questions.  Have a great weekend!