Our unit one math test will be this upcoming Tuesday. On Friday and Monday, students will review for the test and can use these sheets to study for the test.
READING
We're continuing to develop the reading life and partner discussions. After each mini-lesson and D.E.A.R. time, students will be given opportunities to discuss what they're reading. Some of our mini-lessons include:
- Readers create buzz about the books they love!
- To become better readers, we have to discuss what we're reading. How do you keep a conversation on track and how can you be a good discussion partner?
- Readers are like monster truck drivers! Whenever we come across a word we don't know, we have to use different strategies to climb over the hurdle.
- Having a reading companion to discuss our reading with makes us stronger readers. We need to get to know our discussion partners as readers.
- Reading is a lot like going to the movies, the fun part comes after reading time is over and you can talk about what you've read.
- Readers retell what we've read to help organize the story in our head and to inform our partner about what's going on in the story.
- Readers retell the section they just read, but sometimes they add in details from earlier in the story that are important to the part they are retelling now.
WRITING
The goal in the launching unit is to build writing stamina, plan out our thoughts before diving in and begin learning about writing different strategies.
- Students continued to plan and write using sensory details.
- One strategy we've looked at is writers use specific language versus ordinary language. We read the story Night Driving by John Coy and made a t-chart showing the ordinary language he could have used versus the specific language he did use. Students chose their own topic and planned an entry using the specific versus ordinary t-chart.
- On Monday, students wrote their response using their plan.
- We channeled our taste buds and explored specific words that help us describe food. Students chose a food of their own that they love and wrote their own commercials promoting their food using specific language.
- Describing what we see and the exact sounds we hear can be very hard. We went outside and did some observations. Instead of saying that we heard cars or kids playing, we focused on the exact sounds they make. Instead of saying we saw leaves, we tried to describe what the leaves were doing or what they looked like.
- We started our personal narrative unit. We discussed the features of personal narratives and that these stories tend to be about important times in people's lives when they learned something or felt a strong emotion. We reviewed several stories that we've read this year and discussed what the author wanted us to get out of the story and what feeling he or she wanted us to feel.
SCIENCE
We continued on with our mock rock unit!
- Students learned the "Rock Song," which was quite entertaining. This song will help students understand the three types of rocks and their cycles.
- Students wanted to know more about what the sand mix from the mock rock was made out of so they mixed it with water and shook it up. We observed the vials and then let them rest.
- Two days later, we went back to observe the vials and noticed that the mix had fallen to the bottom and settled. The students noticed that there was layers in the mix, which meant there was more than one ingredient in the sand mix.
- They noticed that the water was not as clear as it should so they decided to pour the water out and see what was left behind after it evaporated.
- Beautiful crystals were left behind in the dish and the students figured out that salt was part of the recipe.
- Another property that geologists explore is hardness. Students were given four mystery rocks and had to test the hardness to determine the rock type.
Math
- Students continued to play games such as Factor Pairs and Multiple Turnover. This helped them understand the difference between factors and multiples.
- We spent two days finding all the factors of 100, 200 and 300. We began to explore the rule that factors of one number will also be factors of multiples of that number.
- We continued to test that rule with the numbers 16 and 48. Students did agree that the rule was true and had to find ways to prove that this will work for all numbers.
- Students practiced solving balanced equations such as 8 x ____ = 10 x 4
- We spent time reviewing the concepts of unit one to prep for our test on Tuesday.
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