Week of February 4th

Well Nemo has come and gone and I hope everyone is shoveled out. Let's hope the groundhog is right and that Spring will come early!






Valentine's Day
As you know, Valentine's Day is this Thursday. If students want to exchange Valentine's, I will give a few minutes at the end of the day to exchange. My rule for exchanging Valentine cards is that everyone must receive similar Valentines and they must be kind and positive. Students will need to bring in a bag or box to collect their Valentine Cards. We have 21 students in the class and I will send home a class list tomorrow. 

Long Comp
Our "Mock Comp Day" is scheduled for March 5th. It's important that students are present and on time that day since it's our practice test for the Long Composition.  

Since we did not have school on Friday, the blog is written by me, rather than the students. 

Reading:

• We focused on the qualities of a well written book review and used our checklist to see if other book reviews met the criteria. 
• We planned our book review and focused on character description, plot, theme and why we recommend the book. 
• Students drafted the first paragraph of their book review on Thursday. 

Writing:

• We focused on what makes a good ending and how to answer the prompt without being too obvious. Students worked on revising their piece. 
• I met with students in small groups to focus on punctuation and dialogue while students edited their pieces. 
• On Wednesday, students published their pieces. 
• Using the rubrics and exemplars provided by the state, students learned how they're going to be scored. We looked at examples from the previous "Free time" prompt and examined why students received the scored that they did. 

Math:

• One Monday and Tuesday, we continued with our previous math workshop and learned about adding fractions with unlike denominators  We used 4 x 6 arrays to help.
• On Wednesday, students learned how to create visual models to help them solve subtraction problems with like denominators. 
• Students learned about mixed numbers and improper fractions. They spent the rest of this time making fraction cards for the upcoming workshop. 

Science:

• We watched two videos this week; one was on earthquakes and the other was on volcanoes. Students learned strategies for taking notes on videos such as using symbols or pictures.
• We read a book about how islands are formed and made an mountain flip book.