Weekly Update

Reading & Writing Workshop:
The students are loving our poetry unit, and we are so impressed with the poems they are crafting!  This week, we focused on adding new "tools" to our poetry toolbox.  The "tools," or poetic devices, that were taught included repetition, personification, and similes.  After looking for examples of these poetic devices in poems during reading workshop, students tried adding them to their own poems in writing workshop.  We also looked closely at how line breaks can change the meaning and rhythm of a poem.  After noticing that some students' poems were still sounding like "stories" rather than poems, we also showed students how to turn long phrases and sentences into shorter phrases by eliminating the less important words.  This strategy helped make the students' writing sound more poetic!

Students have been working with their poetry partners during reading workshop to locate and discuss the poetic devices they learn about during the mini-lesson.

At the end of writing workshop each day, students love taking turns in the author's chair to share the poems they have written.

Math:

We continued our geometry unit this week with lessons on "decomposing" polygons.  This strategy helps students break shapes into multiple rectangles.  They find the area of each rectangle separately and then add them together to determine the total area of the polygon.  Students also solved area and perimeter word problems and used tangrams shapes to find the area of different figures.  A unit review was sent home over the weekend to help students study and prepare for the test this week. 

Social Studies:

We continued our region tour this week with stops in Carlsbad Cavern National Park in New Mexico and El Paso, Texas.  We also stopped at the Hoover Dam.  During this tour stop, students worked in teams to solve two problems that engineers faced when building the Hoover Dam.

1. How could they harden 66 million tons of cement in less than 5 years?  (If left to cool on its own, that much cement would take 100 years to set!)

2. What should be done with the Colorado River during the construction of the Hoover Dam? (The Colorado River is a fast-moving river that runs right through the site where they planned to build the dam.)

Students worked in teams and acted as construction engineers when presenting their solutions to the 2 problems to their classmates.

Economics/Class Store:

The class store was open again this week, and students were SO excited to spend the money that they earned in our classroom economy!  Before the class store, students learned about the concept of Inflation.  As the school year has progressed, students have earned a good deal of money.  Many students have become fairly "rich"with all of the All-Star Cash that they have earned and saved.   Since students have more money now, the prices at the class store were increased to reflect the state of our strong economy.  Students were not thrilled to see higher prices at the class store, but it was a great way to teach the concept of inflation!!

All-Star of the Week:

Alexandra was our awesome All-Star of the Week!  She was excited to share 3 special items from her sharing sack on Monday, along with some great photos of her siblings and her beloved cat named Avatar.  Her mom also wrote a wonderful letter to the class telling us 10 things that we may or may not know about Alexandra.  We learned she is a total animal lover!  Her mom joined her in the cafeteria for Lunch Buddy Day on Thursday!