This week we spent many of our days wrapping up our PYP Unit: Who We Are, I taught the last narrative writing lesson and fiction reading lesson. Students will start finishing up their narrative writing pieces, take a post-assessment to show their understanding of inferences, summaries, character traits, and their understanding of texts. We also had a lesson from our counselor, Mrs. Randolph, about diversity. It was a very powerful lesson and all the students were engaged. Math: We started our Geometry Unit about polygons, quadrilaterals, parallel lines, right angles, etc. Students need to be able to classify shapes and describe attributes about them. The students were given examples of polygons and examples of non-polygons. As groups, they had to come up with a definition of their own. We continued this activity for quadrilaterals and parallel lines as well. Ask Your Child: What is a polygon? Answer: A shape with straight sides and no openings. Literacy: Our focus this week was on identifying character traits in the books we are reading. To help us identify character traits, it helps to look at a character's action, what they say, and what they think or feel. Students participated by writing down their character's trait, what evidence from the book made them think that, and then put it on our sticky note wall. See the picture below. Ask Your Child: How would you describe the character in your book? Writing: This week I taught student that good narratives have strong endings, are written in paragraphs, and use dialogue correctly. Students practiced those skills in their writing. We will be writing our final drafts after spending some time editing their work. I have posted all of the anchor charts students are using to write their narratives on the white board, so they are front and center. Take a look at everything they are working to incorporate into their narratives. Science: Students are working on finishing their finals projects for our PYP Unit: Who We Are. As a class, they came up with a rubric they wanted to be graded on. So, I will be using that to grade students on their final pieces. They are identifying 3-5 inherited and acquired traits and writing a short piece on an acquired trait they would like to improve this school year.
FYIs! -Book Fair is this week. Our class will be shopping on November 1st. They may bring money during that time to shop for books. -YOUR CHILD NEEDS TO BE PRACTICING THIER MATH FACTS! :) I can't stress this. As a class, students performed poorly this week. I was bummed to see their results on Friday. They will be tested again on Thursday. Students should have passed their 2's this week. -Spelling will begin this week. They will be getting 5 words they personally misspelled. Their test will be on Thursday. -Reminder no costumes on Tuesday.
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Thanks for attending conferences! I spoke with many of you about helping your child understand their story. These are three skills that we have been working on since the beginning of the year. They are crucial skills your child needs to know that will absolutely help them with testing in the Spring. You can check your students comprehension with these few ideas. Ask them for evidence from their book. That is what really distinguishes understanding a book in Kindergarten through second grade from understanding a book in third grade and on. They need to be able to provide evidence from their book with their answer. Here is some work from a few students in the classroom. They are demonstrating the skills above by keeping track of them on sticky notes as well as in their reader's notebook.
Since this week was a short week, I decided to combine the last two weeks into one update. Our classroom won the golden music award this week! Woo hoo! For those of you who do not know, classrooms have the opportunity to win a weekly award for any of the specials. This week, it was our turn! Yay!
Math: We finished up our first module on multiplication and division and took the final assessment. I will be sharing their scores throughout conferences so you can see how they performed. The students and I are working through the problems they missed to help them learn from their mistakes! We will be starting our geometry unit next. Literacy: We continued with practicing inferences last week as well as finished our read aloud book, Stone Fox. We started our new read aloud book, Pippi Longstocking. I can hardly read it out loud with laughing. For some reason this book just cracks the kids and me up! :) This week I introduced a new skill: summarizing. I pre-assessed these students on these skills and this was a skill every student in the classroom missed. Thus, we have a lot of learning to do! The way I taught the students is to remember this: someone wanted but so then... Someone: Who are/is the main character/characters? Wanted: What did the character want? But: What is the problem? So: How did the character try to solve it? Then: How did the problem resolve? For example: Little Willy, a ten year old boy, wanted to save his Grandfather from dying of sadness but he did not have enough money to pay the taxes his grandfather owed for the farm. So, he used his college money in his bank account to enter a dog sled race where he could win $500 to save his grandfather's farm and his Grandfather. Then Little Willy entered the race and won the money to pay the taxes for Grandfather's farm. Ask Your Child: What happened at the end of Stone Fox? Did it end the way you thought it would? Why or why not? See if they can summarize it using someone wanted but so then. Writing: They continued to work on their small moment. This week they chose one of the stories they wanted to work on publishing. They then tried out three different leads for their stories to try and hook the reader in. Science: Students had the chance to move throughout stations where each station had a different activity about how nature and nurture influence plants, animals, and people. They LOVED the different activities. One activity required them to see how different amounts of water and different soils affected how flowers would grow. We also had a guest speaker come in. She is a genetic scientists and taught the students all about DNA. The students had the opportunity to create a DNA representation. It was a HUGE hit and we were so thankful to have such a wonderful opportunity! See the picture below to see their DNA creations and them working together on the different stations. What a quick week! The students were so kind to me as I was feeling a bit under the weather. At one point I was in the middle of teaching math and a sweet boy raised his hand and goes, "Mrs. Davidson, are you feeling alright?" Talk about melting your heart! Sheeesh! I love these kids hard and often times they feel like my own but to feel the love back was something else! :) Thanks for raising such kind-hearted kiddos! Also another bragging moment about this awesome class: I walked out to pick the students up from lunch recess and our class was the only class lined up and completely silent. That called for a celebration! :) So proud of them! They are working together as a team and demonstrating outstanding behavior for our lunch duty teachers. Math: Goodness gracious...we started the dreaded distributive property. We talked about how the distributive property is meant to help us as mathematicians break a part of multiplication problem into two simpler ones. We all agreed by the end that it doesn't appear that way. Thus we named the property the dang distributive property! So much work told solve such a simple problem. BUT! They started getting the hang of it! It was on their quiz that went home. I have a few students who I still need to meet with, so if you haven't seen it, it will be coming home soon. We continued solving multiplication and division story problems. Literacy: Fiction: We are working on making strong predictions. Strong predictions help readers understand a story better. Students have been making predictions in their personal books as well as our read aloud book, Stone Fox. We have been chatting about how strong predictions explain what you think is going to happen BUT also how why you think it is going to happen based on what has been previously read. PHEW! Lots of thinking! Non-fiction Fridays: As mentioned last week, the students spend time in non-fiction text every Friday. Each Friday I teach them a new strategy about how readers can best understand non-fiction. This week we talked about how sometimes authors use maps to help give more detail about the topic being written. Ask your child: What is your prediction about Stone Fox and WHY do you think that is going to happen? Writing; Students are continuing to write their narrative stories, filling their pages with small moment stories. They are eager to share what they have been writing with our class. We are continuing to work on writing stamina as well as produce small moment stories. Science: Students worked on sorting different inherited and acquired traits. They also designed a creature of any sort but needed to label 5 inherited traits their creature had as well as 5 acquired traits. They were SO into this activity. So fun to watch! See the pictures below of their first sketches. Ask your child: What did you creature and what traits did your creature inherit and acquire? CONFERENCES: If you haven't please make sure you have signed up for ONE conference slot! http://www.signupgenius.com/go/30e0b48a9af2fa7f49-2017 **I also had many students turn in their reading log with VERY minimal reading this week. Please be sure your child is reading 120 minutes (30 min a night) or more a week.** |
Sept. 14th- First Day of Online Learning
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