Week in Review: September 19-23

This week, we have been working on revising our personal narrative rough drafts. We are learning ways to make stronger word choices and stretch our sentences to make them more descriptive. We read a variety of leads to see how writers really grab their readers' attention, and next week, we will focus on improving the lead of our own narratives.

Using Padlet as an interactive bulletin board to share our thoughts on what makes a lead catch a reader's attention

In reading, I have begun individual student testing and will continue that over the next 2 weeks. It is time consuming, but gives me great insight into your child's reading skills. We have had mini-lessons over summarizing strategies and observing character traits and students have been practicing those skills during their independent reading time, while I am testing.

In math, we spent the first part of the week learning about rounding. Ask your child about our drive on the "rounding highway." I was so involved in the lesson that I failed to take any photos, but it was great fun, and I think they learned a lot! We are also learning a variety of strategies for addition, and will move on to subtraction next week.

Adding on an open number line... and writing on our desks!

We learned about the Constitution in social studies, as this week was Celebrate Freedom Week. Special thanks to Maria's dad for providing each student with their own pocket Constitution. We used those as a model to write class constitutions in small groups on Thursday and Friday. We will finish those up on Monday!

In science, we have wrapped up our unit on the states of matter and will have a unit assessment on Monday. Students completed a review in class on Friday so they are well prepared. We spent two science days on a sink or float investigation. Ask your child about the boat they designed and how many pennies it was able to hold before sinking.

Sink of Float investigation: does an orange float?

How about a peeled orange?

Designing, building and testing foil boats to see how many pennies they can support without sinking

I hope that you all have a great weekend, and please remember that Wednesday September 28 is an early release day. Students will be released at 12pm, which is a change from previous years, so please note the new dismissal time.