Matza, Measurement, and More!

We had a fabulous time making matza this week with the expert help of Mrs. Mariashi, Rabbi Gordon, and Morah Yiska! The students practiced rolling out the dough and poking it with holes so that the dough would not rise. We also went on an exciting scavenger hunt around the JCC and CJDS to find chametz! A big thank you goes out to everyone who planned this Passover fun for us!

Project Based Learning

The students presented their projects from their PBL unit on forces. The presentations were fabulous and highlighted the students’ awesome hard work and research. Ask your child about pushes and pulls, inertia, gravity, and static and kinetic friction! They did an excellent job projecting their voices and sharing their learning with the first, third, and fifth graders!

We also had a chance to see the first grade’s presentations on weather!  We learned so much!

Reading

Next week we will begin Unit 4 of our Journey’s curriculum. This unit focuses on heroes and helpers! Our first story is the realistic fiction piece, Mr. Tanen’s Tie Trouble. We will also read the informational text Playground Fun! The students will focus on story structure, and making inferences and predictions as they read. We will also study more figurative language and homographs (words that sound the same but have different meanings.) The students will learn that pronouns, words like I, he, they, and it, can take the place of nouns in sentences. Our vocabulary words are: Received, account, budget, disappointed, chuckled, staring, repeated, and fund.

Writing

This week we finished our unit on persuasive writing and writing with voice. Next week we will begin studying how to write fictional narrative stories and how to use words to paint a clear picture in our readers’ minds. The students will focus on looking for strong new words, using words that describe the five senses, and picking out interesting verbs!

I am almost done holding writing conferences with each student. The students and I looked at recent samples of their writing to see if they had met their writing goals. Together we determined what their next steps are as writers. I will be completing conferences with everyone early next week.

Spelling

This week the students studied words that contain the vowel pairs “ea” and “ai.” Next week, we will study words with long vowels and silent letter patterns, like night and yellow.

Math

This week we completed unit 8 on fractions and began unit 9 on measurement. This unit will deal with different standard forms of measurement like feet, yards, meters, grams, ounces, pounds, tons, pint, cups, quarts, and gallons. These are measurements that are often found on packaging, so you can point them out at home! We will also be studying capacity, perimeter, and area.

Today, we began looking at different forms of standard measurement. We measured our classroom in second graders, but we realized that we are all different sizes so that measurement wouldn’t make sense to anyone else.

Then we measured our classroom in Nathans, but we realized other schools don’t have any Nathans the same size as our Nathan for comparison!

We decided to measure our classroom in yards and this worked out much better! We will continue measuring the world around us next week!