Hello! It was great to see everyone this month for parent/teacher conferences, and open house. I hope you are as pleased as I am with your student's progress.
2017 has taken us outside the classroom in more ways than one! Yesterday, we took a field trip to the Main Library at Copley. Earlier this month, we spent time walking, crawling, and running around the Giant Traveling Map of North America, (from National Geographic.) Students didn't tire of finding cities, landmarks, watersheds, and geographical and political borders. Everyone found parts of the continent they wanted to research further, and we looked at how landscape has affected the human population's migratory patterns and agricultural and industrial development of regions over time.
We also travelled via Skype to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. We prepared for our trip by learning about the sanctuary's history online, and preparing questions for our trip. The guide increased our expertise by introducing us to the sanctuary's elephants personally, and gave us the motivation to help the cause via an upcoming bake sale.
We finished reading Because Of Winn Dixie, and held insightful literature circle discussions about the book's themes of loss, friendship, and acceptance, the emotional evolution of its characters, and the symbolism of weather. Students loved the book, excelled on the end of unit test, and are now enjoying the movie version in order to compare and contrast how settings and character traits are conveyed via different storytelling mediums. One general focus in reading has been on finding author's purpose, and students have been practicing their inference skills, and continue to work on supporting conclusions using evidence from the text.
Each student has their own biography they are closely reading to identify main and supporting ideas. Please ask them about it, as they are all excited about sharing their new knowledge. We are using these books to support our reading goal to pull information from nonfiction texts, and our writing goal of constructing strong paragraphs for reports. Students continue to work on their revision and editing skills.
We have nearly completed a unit on etymology, and students have mastered the meanings of a set of greek and latin roots, and had fun digging through dictionaries, typing pangrams, creating anagrams, identifying palindromes, and reading and writing figures of speech such as metaphors, and similes. Their day to day writing is becoming more sophisticated as a result.
We've been studying weather for Science, and have done hands on experiments investigating the properties of water and its function in the water cycle. Students explored adhesion, cohesion, surface tension, condensation, density, and the formation of clouds. We also examined light waves, and why the sky changes color.
We are delving into more details about the Revolutionary War and its causes and outcomes. We have studied it battles, and leaders, and will be talking more in depth about the constitution and bill of rights.
In math we are studying arithmetic properties using area models and two digit dividend division problems with successive remainders. Students are enjoying a couple new games called Prime Climb, and ZOOM. Both require extensive multiplication, division, addition, and subraction calculations and are reinforcing fast fact recall and deeper mathematical understanding. Iready and Prodigy are programmed to drill some extra geometry and measurement skills in addition to their grade level tasks.
As always, I'm sure I'm forgetting something. We are practicing our cursive and typing skills. Students have taken a liking to Charlie Chaplin, and reader's theater. They enjoy constructive debate and are increasing their vocabulary and working on their analogy skills in games like Apples to Apples. We have a couple new "class pets". Students are welcome to take one home on the weekend to care for, and write about its adventures. I believe everyone has one this weekend.
2017 has taken us outside the classroom in more ways than one! Yesterday, we took a field trip to the Main Library at Copley. Earlier this month, we spent time walking, crawling, and running around the Giant Traveling Map of North America, (from National Geographic.) Students didn't tire of finding cities, landmarks, watersheds, and geographical and political borders. Everyone found parts of the continent they wanted to research further, and we looked at how landscape has affected the human population's migratory patterns and agricultural and industrial development of regions over time.
We also travelled via Skype to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. We prepared for our trip by learning about the sanctuary's history online, and preparing questions for our trip. The guide increased our expertise by introducing us to the sanctuary's elephants personally, and gave us the motivation to help the cause via an upcoming bake sale.
We finished reading Because Of Winn Dixie, and held insightful literature circle discussions about the book's themes of loss, friendship, and acceptance, the emotional evolution of its characters, and the symbolism of weather. Students loved the book, excelled on the end of unit test, and are now enjoying the movie version in order to compare and contrast how settings and character traits are conveyed via different storytelling mediums. One general focus in reading has been on finding author's purpose, and students have been practicing their inference skills, and continue to work on supporting conclusions using evidence from the text.
Each student has their own biography they are closely reading to identify main and supporting ideas. Please ask them about it, as they are all excited about sharing their new knowledge. We are using these books to support our reading goal to pull information from nonfiction texts, and our writing goal of constructing strong paragraphs for reports. Students continue to work on their revision and editing skills.
We have nearly completed a unit on etymology, and students have mastered the meanings of a set of greek and latin roots, and had fun digging through dictionaries, typing pangrams, creating anagrams, identifying palindromes, and reading and writing figures of speech such as metaphors, and similes. Their day to day writing is becoming more sophisticated as a result.
We've been studying weather for Science, and have done hands on experiments investigating the properties of water and its function in the water cycle. Students explored adhesion, cohesion, surface tension, condensation, density, and the formation of clouds. We also examined light waves, and why the sky changes color.
We are delving into more details about the Revolutionary War and its causes and outcomes. We have studied it battles, and leaders, and will be talking more in depth about the constitution and bill of rights.
In math we are studying arithmetic properties using area models and two digit dividend division problems with successive remainders. Students are enjoying a couple new games called Prime Climb, and ZOOM. Both require extensive multiplication, division, addition, and subraction calculations and are reinforcing fast fact recall and deeper mathematical understanding. Iready and Prodigy are programmed to drill some extra geometry and measurement skills in addition to their grade level tasks.
As always, I'm sure I'm forgetting something. We are practicing our cursive and typing skills. Students have taken a liking to Charlie Chaplin, and reader's theater. They enjoy constructive debate and are increasing their vocabulary and working on their analogy skills in games like Apples to Apples. We have a couple new "class pets". Students are welcome to take one home on the weekend to care for, and write about its adventures. I believe everyone has one this weekend.