Weekly Update

Reading Workshop: 
This week students focused on retelling and inferring.  Students reviewed how to retell a story with a 5 finger retelling: characters, setting, problem, sequence of events, solution.

Students hold up fingers as they give their retelling to remind themselves of each of the five  parts.

Making inferences and supporting our inferences with evidence from the text will be a huge part of our reading instruction this school year.  Since we are reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, students were asked to highlight 3 parts of the text that they felt were important and make an inference on a sticky note based on their understanding of that part of the text.  This was a 2-day lesson that allowed students to share and discuss their inferences with their "talk partner" on the second day.

Readers also did a Visible Thinking routine this week that we call "Step Inside."  Upon finishing our class read aloud, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,  students were asked to put themselves in the shoes of the main character to think more deeply about how he was feeling.  The samples below show how some students stepped inside Edward's character.

We are also meeting with students in small groups to revisit and teach lessons that focus on their assigned reading goals for this card marking.

Elena and Miruna work on finding "chunks" in multi-syllable words.

Writing Workshop:
This week students reread all of the pieces they have written so far and chose one story to draft outside of their notebook.  We discussed what a final copy should look like and also introduced the idea of paragraphing.  As students wrote their draft, they were supposed to ask themselves the following questions:

• Did I start my story with an exciting lead?
• Did I use descriptive details to "paint a picture" for the reader?
• Did I use strong verbs?
• Did I tell the internal story by adding what I am thinking and feeling?
• Did I write a solid ending for my story?

Math:

 We finished Unit 1 this week and continued to practice solving and creating word problems.  Students are really doing well with identifying the type of problem and determining whether they need to use multiplication or division.  We also introduced variables and are asking students to now write their equations with a variable as shown below.

A Unit 1 Math Review was sent home over the weekend.  This will help your child prepare for the test in class on Monday.

Social Studies:

We began a new unit this week called The Peopling of The United States.  In this unit, students will understand the meaning of diversity as they learn about the first 5 groups of Americans who migrated to the United States: Native Americans, Latino Americans, European Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans.  This is a short unit that we will finish up during the week ahead.

All-Star of the Week:

The class loved learning about Jaxon this week!  His sharing sack items included a special wooden bat and a baseball trophy, which made it clear that he is a fan of sports.  His family pictures also showed his love of sports, and we even learned that his family is trying to visit all of the MLB ballparks!  The class especially loved Jaxon's parent letter that was written to the tune of B-I-N-G-O.  The class joined in on the chorus and sang J-A-X-O-N.  His favorite book, Don't Let the Pigeon Stay up Late, was also a big hit with his classmates!