February 29th- March 4th

Reading
This week the students read a nonfiction piece about schools around the world and some funny school poetry! The students had a chance to write poems about CJDS. They began studying the different rules for using quotation marks and commas to show that someone is speaking and we will continue to study these rules next week. The students did a fabulous job identifying the author’s purpose for writing different pieces. We noticed that you have to think about the genre of the text to understand why the author wrote it. Next week, we are reading a biography on Helen Keller and an informational piece titled Talking Tools that explains different tools used to help people communicate. The students will review how to identify the main idea and details of what they read and how to summarize text. Our vocabulary words are: Curious, imitated, knowledge, motion, silence, illness, darkness, and behavior.

Spelling
This week the students studied words that contained the long “i” sound (spelled “igh”) and the long “o” sounds (spelled “ow”.) Next week, the students will work on words containing the long “a” sound (spelled “ai”) and the long “e” sound (spelled “ea”). These are words like rain and beach.

Writing
The students wrote persuasive essays this week about something they’d like to change at home, at school, or in their community. The students wrote with as much “voice” as possible to get their point across to their readers. Next week the students will continue persuasive writing and will begin their next writing unit on word choice. This unit focuses on using better adjectives, verbs, and adverbs to make writing more specific and exciting!

Math
This week the students reviewed how to subtract with regrouping and how to find the median, mode, and range of a data set. We learned that a data set is just a group of numbers. The median is the middle of those numbers when you put all of them in order. The mode is the “most popular” number, or the number listed the most times. The range is the maximum number minus the minimum number. For example:

Data set: 10, 3, 4, 9, 3,
First step: Put the numbers in order from minimum to maximum-   3, 3, 4, 9, 10
Median (middle number): 4
Mode (most popular): 3
Range (maximum – minimum): 10 – 3 = 7

Next week, the students will begin Unit 8 on fractions!