Week 21

This week the students were treated to a performance by the Charlotte Ballet. Mariashi talked about the growth mindset that the dancers had to develop in order to master their fancy footwork! Most of the dancers had been training for over ten years and still take classes each day!

Writing and Project Based Learning

The students read books on natural resources this week and took notes that we will use to write our newscast. The students worked in teams and individually to find good research so that we can fill our reporting with facts.

Here are our researchers hard at work!

Reading

The students are working on two important reading strategies: Reading forward and rereading. Reading forward means that you are not getting stuck on a difficult word for too long, but instead reading forward to see if you can figure out what the word must mean. When the students get stuck on a word it makes it difficult for them to comprehend what they are reading. The other strategy, rereading, requires the students to go backwards and reread when something doesn’t make sense. I am modeling these strategies when I read aloud from our chapter book and they are great strategies to practice at home!

Vocabulary

Next week, the students will read a biography on North Carolina’s own Wright Brothers! They will study the following words from the biography: Board, curious, dangerous, doubt, eager, fear, leap, screech, squeeze, and village. 

Spelling

The students reviewed our “Two vowels go walking, the first vowel does the talking” pattern this week. This pattern focuses on vowel pairs where you do not hear the second vowel, like in the words beach, available, and coat. Next week the students will work on words the need “s” or “es” added to the end to make them plural.

Math

We finished our sixth math unit this week by studying multiplication and division. The students learned that when you multiply you are taking groups and adding them together, and when you divide you are taking a bigger number and dividing it into smaller groups. The students do well when they draw out their thinking on these problems, for example, if you have 24/3 = _____ the students can draw out three circles and “give out” the 24, resulting in 8 in each circle. Our next math unit will continue to work on these strategies as well as subtraction. We will also cover doubling and halving numbers, measurement, and graphing.