February 19, 2021

Reading

Our readers are working hard to find the main idea of nonfiction passages. One way they are thinking about this skill is to ask themselves, “If this passage needed a title, what could I call it?” The students are then checking to see if the details in the passage support the title, or main idea, that they chose.

Each day, the students have been practicing finding the main idea of passages about Dr. Jane Goodall and some of the famous chimpanzees that she studied. The class had the pleasure of listening to a guest speaker, Robin Levine, (also known as Baylee and Jacob’s aunt) who studied primates in college and has met Jane Goodall! Robin joined us on Zoom and taught us so many cool things about primates like chimpanzees and gorillas. Did you know chimpanzees build nests, like hammocks, and sleep in the trees?!

Being able to read fluently is a big support to the students’ overall reading comprehension. To practice their fluency, the students are participating in some readers’ theater where they read a script over and over and try to make their lines sound smooth. They are doing a great job reading plays about Jack and the Beanstalk. We will try to put some videos on Instagram for you!

Writing

The students have been working hard to apply the many grammar skills they have learned. Some skills we practiced this week are using quotation marks around dialogue, putting commas in a series, using apostrophes in contractions, and capitalizing all proper nouns.

Spelling

This week the students practiced words that contain the silent letter patterns “igh” and “ow”, like in the words right and yellow. Next week, they will review the silent vowel patterns “ai”, “ea”, and “oa”, like in rain, each, and oat.

Science

The students are deep into their science unit on the life cycle of plants with Mrs. Jaydn! Each student has a bean plant experiment growing on our classroom window and they are diligently checking that the plant gets the proper water and sunlight! The students are researching facts about the purposes of different parts of a plant (like the roots, leaves, and stems.)

Math

The students are practicing subtraction. This week we talked about slowing down and asking yourself what is the easiest way that I can solve this problem? Sometimes, when the numbers are close together, it is easier to just count from the lower number to the higher number and find the difference. The students practiced this with problems like 20 – 16, 52 – 47, and 301- 299.

Our current math unit has introduced the students to multiplication and division story problems. The students have quickly realized that using strategies like repeated addition and drawing out their thinking are fun ways to solve these types of problems! Our next math unit will cover number patterns (like doubling and halving numbers) and will review working with data sets to find the median, mode, and range.