It was a pleasure to share our learning with families this
week at Open House. The students were proud to show off all of their hard work
so far.
Math:
We began Topic 1 multiplication and
division and its meaning this week. Lessons this week focused on multiplication
strategies, properties, and array models. Students are learning strategies for
remembering or efficiently determining multiplication facts within 12 x 12.
Today we talked about how you can use the distributive property to split
on of the factors in a problem like 9 x 8 into easier factors. Students used
this method in way that worked for the facts sets they know well.
Ex: 9 x 8 can be written as (4 x
8) + ( 5 x 8)
Reader's Workshop:
This week we finished our
introduction to story elements. Students learned how to find the theme
or author's message of the book by looking at how the characters change throughout
the story. Together as a class we identified several messages that we can use
in our own lives from the book The
Bad Case of the Stripes by
David Shannon. Students felt that David Shannon is encouraging us to be
ourselves and not to worry about what other people think. This week we also
read The Widow's Broom by Chris Van Allsburg, to help us
practice inferring. Students learned to combine evidence from the text and
their schema (background knowledge) to develop ideas about the story. We talked
about how determining character traits and theme are inferences that require us
to look for evidence from the text as well as use our background knowledge.
Writer's Workshop:
Now that students have drafted their
narrative story ideas, we are working on revision strategies to make their
writing better, a process that all writers go through. This week we focus on
first identifying the internal (feelings and thoughts) and external (actions, dialogue)
events in our stories and mentor stories. We determined that a balance of both
internal and external events creates the best story. Most students found that the internal events in their story were weaker than their external events, so we
worked to revise and add more internal events.
Science:
This week we continued to study weather.
Students learned all about the different weather instruments or tools used to
measure weather. We also created our much anticipated terrariums. We will be
making observations daily to see if we can see evidence of the water cycle in
our terrariums. In Project Based Learning this Friday students began their
weather station challenge. Students are challenged to work in collaborative groups
to design and build a weather station that measures two different weather phenomena.
Students will use their knowledge of the weather tools to complete this project
in the coming weeks. Students will then get to put their weather station to the
test, and collect data about the weather.
Social Studies:
We are nearing the end of our unit of
study on map skills. This week we learned about intermediate cardinal
directions and using a scale on a map.
