“Hooray! What a great week!” exclaimed the class.

A few reminders for next week:
Tuesday- We are going to see Charlotte’s Web at Ovens Auditorium!
Thursday- Half Day for Purim. Remember to wear your awesome costume!
Friday- No school, teachers’ planning day!

Reading
This week we focused on using quotation marks around dialogue. We wrote stories as a class that needed quotation marks and made our own comic strips! We talked about quotation marks as working like a jacket, you always have to put on both arms and everything goes inside! This helps us remember that commas, question marks, periods, and exclamation points should go on the inside of a set of quotation marks! “Got it?”

Today, we played a game that helped us work on our dictionary skills. The students focused on using guide words and identifying the parts of speech. We also practiced words this week containing the vowel pairs oi, oy, ew, and oo. The students found the authors’ purpose for writing nonfiction works and poems. The students had a chance to practice their oral reading fluency and expression by working with partners on the play City Mouse, Country Mouse.

Next week the students’ vocabulary words are: curious, imitated, knowledge, motion, silence, illness, darkness, and behavior. The students will practice finding the main idea and supporting details in a biography on Helen Keller. They will also read a nonfiction text called Talking Tools that focuses on machines that help the deaf. We will study how to use the suffix -ly to change words into meaning “in a way that is.” For example quick becomes quickly (in a way that is quick.) The students will edit their work to make sure they have capitalized proper nouns.

Spelling
This week the students focused on making nouns plural by adding “s” or “es.” Next week the students will learn how to drop the “y” and add “ies” when making words like baby plural.

Writing
This week we continued our focus on persuasive writing and using our voice to convey emotions. Next week we will continue working on this same genre of writing, but the students will be required to add in additional reasons and details for their arguments. We will work as a class to write paragraphs about some of the issues we see in society that we would like to see changed or improved.

Math
This week was all about data! We gathered data doing the long jump and measuring our arm spans.  Once we had gathered data we put those numbers in order from minimum to maximum. We found the range (maximum – minimum = range), mode (most popular number), and median (middle number) of our set of data. We practiced these skills with other sets of data too! This week we also practiced doing addition and subtraction in our heads. We call this “mental math” and we use tricks to help use get our answers more quickly. For example:  25 + ____ = 33. I know that 25 + 5 = 30, so 3 more would be 33. The missing number is 8!

Next week, we will finish unit 7 and begin our next unit on fractions!

Here we are doing the long jump! We measured our jumps in centimeters. We had some super jumpers!