Let it Snow!

We had a short week, but we used every minute of it! I hope everyone is having a great snow day! Go Panthers!!

Reading

This week we took some time to discuss and share the students’ reading responses. Each student has their graded responses in the back of their white notebook. The students are doing a very nice job briefly summarizing what they’ve read and now I am encouraging them to use the other reading strategies we have studied in class. For example, this week we worked on analyzing characters. The students read a folktale called How the Chipmunk got His Stripes and they worked on describing the main character’s traits and determining his feelings. The students can write reading responses in which they do the same thing using the characters in their chapter books. Other reading strategies they can use are comparing and contrasting characters or story events, drawing conclusions about things not stated in the text, making predictions, thinking about the author’s purpose for writing, and writing about new and interesting words.

The students had an introduction to synonyms, antonyms, and using a thesaurus this week. We are focusing on using more interesting and specific verbs and adjectives in our writing.

Spelling

This week the students began retaking the 250 frequently used word assessment. We will continue with our regular spelling lessons next week.

Writing

The students worked on writing conventions this week by studying how to form paragraphs. We learned that a paragraph should contain one big idea. When you’re ready to write about a new idea you need to drop down to the next line and indent. The students wrote a paragraph using the information they learned reading last week’s article Big Storms. We also began our new unit on writing with voice. The students discussed the concept of writing with “voice” and they decided it’s what makes your writing interesting for your reader.

Math

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The students have learned so much about geometry! As we move into our next unit, the students are encouraged to keep noticing geometry in the world around them. We found symmetry in plants and butterflies, and discovered different types of prisms hiding in our classroom! Next week, we will begin adding more than two numbers at a time. The students will learn that they can add up numbers in any order. For example: When adding 22 + 17 + 13 + 8= ________, you can add 17 + 13 = 30 and 22 + 8 = 30, then 30 + 30 = 60. The students will hunt for numbers they can add together to get a sum that ends in zero. This unit will also cover subtraction and multiplication in more detail.