What a Bunch of Characters!

This week we focused on characters! Who are they? What do their actions show us? What motivates them? Our character work had us guessing why people do the things they do!

Reading
This week we read several folktales full of silly characters. Our favorite folktale was, The Ant and the Grasshopper. In this story a hardworking ant spends his days getting ready for the winter by gathering and storing food, while the silly grasshopper plays all day! The students had a chance to read the script of this story and do a quick readers’ theater performance.

Here the students are practicing reading with expression and building their oral fluency.IMG_1760 IMG_1761 IMG_1762 IMG_1763 IMG_1771IMG_1779IMG_1780

The students had a chance to act out the readers’ theater. We had some very silly grasshoppers, hardworking ants, and awesome narrators!

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In reading this week we also worked on breaking words into syllables after the first vowel in the word, like di-ver, li-mit, and ro-dent! We played our verb action game again and focused on “ed” and “ing” endings. We also used Charlotte’s Web to help us think deeper about characters’ traits, actions, and motivations.

Here is a “Character Web” we made about Wilbur, the pig from the story.

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Next week, we will begin lesson 10 which focuses on determining facts and opinions. The students will read Jellies, a nonfiction piece on jellyfish. Our vocabulary words will be: Decide, disgusting, drift, millions, simple, wrapped, choices, and weaker.

Spelling
This week we focused on words with the long “u” or long “i” sounds. Next week we will work on words containing the consonant digraphs “ch” and “th”, like in the words children, itchy, them, and worth.

Writing
Currently in writing we are working on organizing informational paragraphs. The students read an article in a “Time for Kids” magazine about volcanoes. They then had to take the volcano facts they had learned and create a paragraph teaching the reader about that topic. The students were taught how to create a topic sentence that will tell their reader what to expect when they read the rest of their paragraph. Next week, the students will pick an animal on which to create an information essay.

Math
This week we came to the end of Unit 5 on geometry. The final concept in that unit is symmetry. See if your child can find objects that have symmetry in the world around them. Our next unit starts with adding three numbers at one time. The students will learn that they can add these numbers in any order, but there might be an easier way to add them if they rearrange them. For example, 18 + 23 + 12= ______. If you reorganize this problem and add 18 and 12 together first, it makes it easier when you are ready to add on the 23 (18 + 12 = 30,  30 +23 = 53!)

Here the students are playing the “3 addend” game.IMG_1816 IMG_1817 IMG_1818 IMG_1821

And finally, here are our picks for who will go to the Super Bowl! Have a great weekend!
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