Week 24
On Monday, we celebrated our 100th day of school! We timed ourselves doing 100 hops (it only took 49 seconds), we walked 100 steps away from our classroom to see where we’d end up, we added 100 drops of water to our fish tank, we estimated how tall 100 cubes would be in feet and inches, and more! We are all 100 days smarter!
Reading
This week, the students read nonfiction pieces about Mozart and schools around the world. They used the information they learned from these pieces to create brochures that teach their subject to someone else. In order to complete this task, the students had to read and synthesize the information to determine which facts were important enough to include in their brochure. For their biography brochure on Mozart, they had to use information from more than one source! I was impressed with the way the students tackled these new challenges!
As we move towards the end of the school year, we are going to work on some new phonics skills! This week we discussed reading words that contain “au” and “aw” like fault and claw. We also worked on words that contain “oy” and “oi” like in boy and soil. We will continue to study these phonics skills next week!
Sentence Editing
The students are working hard to learn how to write perfect sentences! We have decided to refocus our efforts on the basics of sentence writing, because the students have noticed that they aren’t using these skills in their writing. The students have learn to capitalize the beginning of a sentence and all proper nouns, use punctuation at the end of the sentence, and put enough space between words that the reader can easily read their writing. Below, the students are working together to edit a paragraph. They have also been working on editing their own writing to make sure they are doing their best work!
Writing
This week the students used rubrics to evaluate the ideas, organization, and conventions they used in their most recent story. Overall, the students noticed they are able to pick strong ideas from their real lives and fill their stories with a lot of detail. The students also found that they are able to write stories with a beginning, middle, and end and that the ideas in their stories are easy to follow for their readers. Each student determined their next writing goal by identifying an area of weakness on the rubric. We are going to write new stories next week and focus on mastering our goals! Here are some of our writing goals:
- I will write a story with a compelling beginning or lead, that draws my reader into the piece.
- I will write a story with an ending that makes my reader feel like everything is wrapped up.
- I will use my “voice” to help the reader connect with my story emotionally (I will help the reader feel what I was feeling in my story.)
- I will use my knowledge of spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and spacing to make my story easy to read.
Below the students are evaluating their writing and making their new writing goals.
Spelling
This week the students studied another rule for making words plural- when a word ends in “y”, you drop the “y” and add “ies!” See if your child can show you the hand movements we use to remember this rule! We will be adding on to this rule that you don’t drop the “y” when there is a vowel before it, like in boys, but I have not introduced that yet. Next week, we will study words that begin with a silent “k” or “w” like know and write.
Math
Now that we are in unit 7, the students are working on finding patterns in numbers, multiplying and dividing, and estimating before adding and subtracting. To find patterns we are working on problems like this: Start at number 3, count up by 4’s, and write down 10 counts. What pattern do you see in the one’s place? The answer to this problem would look like this: 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23, 27, 31, 35, 39. The pattern in the one’s place is: 3, 7, 1, 5, 9… We have found that the hardest part of problems like this, is reading and following the directions!
Below the students are playing math games on the 100th day of school. These games required them to add numbers to see who could get to 100 first!
