Happy Holidays!

We wish all of our all-star students & families a happy and healthy holiday break!

Check out the slideshow below from our class holiday party!  Remember, you can double click on the slideshow to view photos individually or click HERE to see the album and download your favorite photos.

Weekly Update

Let it Snow!

Reading Workshop
We continued our mystery unit in class.  Each detective club is nearing the end of its chapter book.  The conversations have been pretty exciting!  Students have taken a lot of good reading detective notes and have come up with a list of suspects.  It will be fun to find out how the mysteries end.  We focused on specific character traits of the characters in our books and practiced providing evidence from the book to support our thinking.  We also learned more about a red herring (clue which throws the detective off track) and discussed possible red herrings in our books.

Writing Workshop
Students have been working on their personal essays.  They began with an opinion statement, such as "I think people should reach to do the impossible."  Next, students worked on writing an introduction.  They also worked on beginning to write two, focused short stories which support their opinion statement.  We hope to finish the essays up in class this week.

Gingerbread Workshop
The class had a lot of fun building and decorating gingerbread houses!  Thank you so much to everyone for donating our needed supplies!  Thanks also to all of the parent volunteers for helping our class build and decorate!  We couldn't have done it without you!!

Science
Students continued to learn more about light from a few explorations in class.  We discovered the difference between transparent, translucent, and opaque materials.  We also learned that light bends when it passes from one material to another.

Weekly Update

Reading Workshop
The students are loving our mystery unit!  Each student has a detective case file in which they keep track of important clues, determine possible suspects, and provide evidence from the book to support their suspicions.  Last week they began meeting with their detective clubs to discuss their assigned mysteries.  Students are learning conversation prompts that encourage them to agree/disagree with others, build on each other's ideas, and ask questions of their groups members to clarify their thinking.

A detective club gets ready to discuss their mystery.

Each student has a case file in which they keep their book and keep track of clues and suspects.

Detective Zaits at work!

Brock, Calin, and Orlando are finding some suspicious happenings in their A-Z Mystery!

Writing Workshop
We started a new unit this week, Personal Essay.  Students began the week reading personal essays written by adults and kids.  They learned that personal essays are often focused on a "big idea" and include a message that is learned through a personal life experience.  After determining the "big ideas" in the essays they read, students developed their own idea list for the personal essays they will begin to write.

Math
Students finished up Unit 2 in math last week and took the final test on Friday.  This unit really required students to read story problems carefully and choose the mathematical operation that would make the most sense.  The unit focused mostly on multiplication and division, but there was also some addition and subtraction mixed in some of the story problems.  You will find the corrected test in your child's homework folder this week.  We will now begin Unit 3: Measurement, Time, and Graphs.

Social Studies
We finished our train tour of the Northeast region last week.  What a great trip we had!  Students especially enjoyed our last stops in New York City and Washington D.C.  We pretended to climb to the top of the Empire State Building in NYC and "visited" many monuments and memorials in Washington D.C.  At the end of the tour, students glued all of the souvenirs they collected into their region binders to create scrapbook pages.

We are patriotic on the train to Washington D.C.!

Nanthana writes a travel journal in her region binder after each tour stop.

All-Star of the Week
Jordan was our all-star last week!  He had a fantastic time sharing items from his sharing sack and showing the class his fun photos from his family trip to Kalahari.  Perhaps his favorite day of the week was Wednesday when his mom made a PowerPoint slide show in which she told the class lots of things we didn't know about Jordan.  He also enjoyed a special lunch with grandpa on Thursday.  It was especially fun to hear his Minecraft parody!