April 11th – 15th
Wow! This was an exciting and action packed week! The students are working incredibly hard in their Project Based Learning class to create movies, art displays, and games that teach the concepts of motion! It is so awesome to see how much they have learned on this science topic! The students also participated in a model Seder where they moved between stations that represented all of the different aspects of Pesach. Ask your child to show you the Haggadah they made! Our week was very busy but we used every minute of class time wisely!
Reading
This week the students worked on identifying the actions, motivations, and traits that make the characters in a story special. We worked with two biographies to study characters- My Name is Gabriela and The Dog that Dug for Dinosaur Bones. We found that to figure out a character’s motivations and traits you have to first look at their actions, or what they are doing in the text. This week we also worked on the suffixes “y” and “ful” and practiced dropping the “y” before adding “ies” to make a word plural. We reviewed nouns, verbs, and adjectives this week too!
We have begun our end of the year reading assessments to determine the students’ growth in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. We will continue these assessments next week so that after Pesach Break I can review any skills that are needed to be ready for third grade!
Spelling
The students are working on spelling words with more than one syllable. We will continue to work on this skill for the next few weeks. The students enjoy doing quick spelling practice on their white boards by reading a word, saying it out loud, covering it up, spelling it, and checking it! The students are practicing this strategy below:
Writing
The students completed their animal research and drafted their reports this week. Many of the students have also edited and published their reports and they are on display in the hallway! All of the students will have the chance to complete their animal reports next week. During the process of researching and writing their reports the students have been meeting with me one-on-one and in small group writing conferences to discuss the strengths of their writing and talk about areas where they can improve. The students know their personal writing goals which vary from, “I need to capitalize the beginning of EVERY sentence I write,” to “I need to pick more powerful verbs!”
Next week we will continue working on our word choice unit and begin our final writing unit on sentence fluency.
Math
We completed our measurement unit this week by learning about weight in ounces, grams, pounds, and tons! Throughout this unit the students have been thinking about the appropriate unit to use for different types of measurement. For example, we use pounds and ounces to measure babies and tons to measure elephants. We also studied area and perimeter. Our next math unit focuses on adding and subtraction money, making change, using decimals points to represent dollars and cents, and working with parentheses in equations. For example: 13 + (11 – 7 ) = 17 or (9 + 9) – 12 = 6 Always solve the math in the parentheses first!
