What a beautiful fall day outside! I keep hinting at Matt that I want to visit Wilson's Orchard soon and enjoy this fall weather- hopefully you all get a chance to get some time outside this weekend. I had so much fun at the Carnival on Friday- (How about those whistles!?) It was great to see some of you! It always fills me with joy when I see how excited the kids get about events like that- I even remember mine from elementary school, we called it the "Fun Fair!" I looked forward to it all month! Here is a quick update on what we will be working on in class this upcoming week:
Reading: Our essential question, "What motivates one character to help another?" continues to influence discussion about our big idea for this unit: Helping brings out the best in us. Our main selection, Stormalong, is a traditional folktale that will help us better infer the motivations of a story's characters. We will also be focusing on predicting the events of a story and reading with expression.
Writing: Students will be starting rough drafts of their very own fictional narratives! Last week we discussed and brainstormed various ideas for creative stories and started pre-writing. This week we will be starting the writing process by revising, editing, and publishing our work! :)
Spelling: Our spelling pattern this week focuses on homophones! These are tricky because they are words that sound the same but mean something different. Here is the list:
1. wait
2. weight
3. heard
4. herd
5. days
6. daze
7. heel
8. heal
9. peek
10. peak
11. sent
12. scent
13. cent
14. feat
15. feet
16. vain
17. vein
18. vane
19. miner
20. minor
Phew! If you practice words with your child, emphasizing the sentence or context that they are in is extremely important. It is a good listening activity, too! :)
Math: This week we will continue learning about various aspects of displaying data and be reviewing terms such as median, mean, mode, and range. We are also going to spend significant time on addition with three digit numbers! If you attended curriculum night you may remember that I mentioned there are various ways to compute addition and subtraction problems. Our goal is to give students many methods for their "toolbox" so to speak, but Iowa Core Curriculum stresses knowledge and usage of the standard algorithm. (The way we all learned in grade school, which is "carrying over" a place value). Please keep this in mind as you help your child with homework these next few weeks! Thanks for all your support! :)
Science: This week we will be testing various minerals based on properties. We will be completing a "scratch test" to test for hardness and also trying to see which minerals have calcite in them! We are studying four different minerals but students don't know which ones are which. We are classifying them by completing various experiments, just like geologists do! Here are some pictures of our geologists at work! (Some of my other ones didn't save!) :(
We also did a Reader's Theater last week with our small group books- The students love these! I was a part of one of them but I got a snapshot of the other two groups!
REMINDER: Picture day is tomorrow!! Send your child to school with their order form and looking great so it can go without a hitch! :)
Have a great week everyone!
-Ms. Shapleigh
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