Week of October 12-16

This was a short week! Between no school on Monday, and myself out on Tuesday, it seemed to go by way too fast.

In reading, we are focusing on character traits and how authors demonstrate particular traits through the actions and words of a character. This is important in writing as well, and we have spent some time this week focusing on showing, not telling, with our words.

We are continuing multiplication in math, and this week we learned about area models.  We have also spent a couple of days learning how to create and use tables to solve problems.

This Friday, we logged onto to our online Social Studies book for the first time. Students seemed to enjoy reading about citizenship with the interactive text. This will be a great resource for us this year!

Also for social studies, we had two guest speakers related to our PBL. Unfortunately, I missed the first speaker on Tuesday, but was proud of how my class behaved on Wednesday when we learned about the Golden Cheeked Warbler and how they are endangered here in Texas.

We are wrapping up our unit on matter in science and did a great experiment with Mrs. Swyers' class. We used a great tool called Go Temp, which lets us connect a thermometer to a computer so that we can see a visual graph of temperature change. We began with a pot of ice, and applied het through a hot plate, and were able to watch a solid turn to a liquid (melting into water), and then change to a gas (evaporating as water vapor). The kids were excited to watch the temperature change from 32 degrees to over 200 degrees as it boiled!

Because of the smoke in the air from the Bastrop wildfires, we had indoor recess on Wednesday and Thursday. They had a good time making rubber band bracelets and playing board games.

Next week is the last week of our first grading period, so we will have assessments in reading, math and science. our next units include poetry for language arts, perimeter and time for math, and mixtures in science. We also have a fun visit planned with our kindergarten buddies on Tuesday. I hope everyone has a great weekend!