Weekly Update

Reader's Workshop

Students are doing a great job with Reader’s Workshop routines.

In Reader's Workshop students learned how to use their writing journals to record their thinking about their reading through letter writing. The focus of this week's minilesson was narrative story elements. Students reviewed plot, setting, characters, conflict, and theme. Students will gain a deeper understanding of each of these elements throughout the year through interactive read-alouds. We also took a deeper look at plot, by using Story Mountains to track the events in the story "Dog Breath" by Dav Pilkey. In collaborative groups students determined which event was the "turning point" of the story.

 Another minilesson this week focused on characters. We discussed the character Camilla in A Bad Case of the Stripes by David Shannon this to help us learn about characters. We focused on her actions, words, and feelings to help us determine who she is as a person (character traits). Students worked on providing evidence for traits they felt fit her character. We also used this book to think about the author’s message or theme. Students did a great job thinking about the lesson David Shannon wanted us to learn as readers.

Math

We have officially completed our first math topic (Topic 3 place value). Topic 3 assessments will come home early next week. This week students learned and practiced strategies for preparing for a math assessment. Also, students continued to practice math workshop routines by trying a few place value games, working on their place value detectives project, and signing up for Xtra.org math fact practice (flyers when home today).

Writer's Workshop

We officially began writer's workshop this week with a special guest. Len Cabral came and share stories with us as we kicked out our year of writing. Our first lesson in writer's workshop this week focused on generating narrative story ideas. Students thought of strong emotions like guilt and excitement to help generate a large list of ideas. We also talked about how important people, places, and things can be a sources for our story ideas as well. Some of our next lessons focused on making sure our ideas are "seed" ideas not "watermelon" ideas so that we can zoom in on them with detail and tell the story step-by-step (just like Len Cabral did).

  

On Creative Arts Friday students engaged in an activity to practice working in groups. After the marshmallow challenge last week, students developed a list of important things to remember when working groups to use in future projects.

Constitution Day

We celebrated Constitution Day today (actual date 9/17) as a grade by taking a "virtual" field trip to the capital to learn more about what the Constitution is and why it is so important to us. We also developed a class Constitution earlier this week, by first looking back at the question students answered on the first day of school and developing a short list of rules that we will need to follow.