Weekly Update

As a teacher, it is moments like the picture below that melt my heart.  Devon and Zain listened intently to Orlando read aloud about spiders from a magazine.  It's so fun to be in the middle of our nonfiction unit.  Students' minds are like sponges, and they love to learn all of the interesting facts and details they are reading about!

Research Workshop
Students continued their country research this week.  They began taking notes on each of their subtopic webs.  Each day they are learning a new strategy for taking notes.  We focused on taking notes as fact fragments versus writing complete sentences.  This has proven to be a bit tricky for students, but we will continue working on it.  We also discussed the difference between an important fact versus an interesting detail.  Although interesting details can be facts as well, we want students to only take notes on the most important facts about their subtopics.  Students learned they can use text features, such as captions, to take notes as well.  Soon all of their hard work taking notes will be turned into complete thoughts as they write paragraphs about each topic.

Math Workshop
We wrapped up Unit 3 this week.  The unit test covered the various skills which were taught throughout the unit, including: reading and creating a bar graph, telling time, measurement, and elapsed time.  The test will go home on Monday.  Please take some time to go over the test with your child and work on correcting any problems he/she may have missed.  Elapsed time word problems were by far the trickiest concept from this unit.  We hope to revisit this skill again this year.  If you notice your child is struggling with it a bit, please work on it at home as well.  

Science
We also finished up our Light & Heat unit.  Students learned many new concepts from this unit through different investigations in class.  Your child should be able to give you a few examples of light sources and tell you light travels in a straight path.  He/she should also understand light bends, or refracts, when it travels from air to water.  During one of our last investigations, students discovered ice melts faster in your hands versus a plastic cup because your hands provide heat energy.  We will begin our next science unit this week.

All-Star of the Week
Students wrote the nicest compliments to Emma on Friday!  They loved the items from her sharing sack and her read aloud, Duck! Rabbit!  We're still wondering if it was a duck or a rabbit...cute story!  Emma also enjoyed two very special letters from her mom and dad!  Below is a picture of our All-Star with her lunch buddies; her mom and grandma brought her sushi!