Upcoming Dates:
- March 4 and March 12 Parent Teacher Conferences
- March 16 - 20 Spring Break
READING:
We are in our Reading Unit Called Bigger Books Mean Amping Up Reading Power. During this Unit we built the following charts to anchor our thinking when reading:
We will conclude this unit by launching Book Clubs. Students will understand club member behaviors. They will create a plan, set goals and work together to accomplish their goals.
WRITING:
Our current writing unit is Narrative Writing. During this unit students will write short stories based on true events from their lives. By the end of the unit students will be able to:
- Discover small moments that matter-generating ideas
- Generate tiny topics for writing
- Stretch out small moments- learning to plan a story by touching each page and saying what they will write
- Write a good beginning, middle and end
- Write with detail: Magnifying a small moment
- Bring characters to life by using talk, feel or actions
- Set goals and make plans for writing time
- Use checklist to self assess and plan for next parts
- Close Reading: Looking closely at how mentor authors write and trying it
- Collaborate a partner to help make a story better (revise by listening)
- Choose strong words to help a reader visualize
- Revise and edit rough drafts
- Conventions are always a big emphasis:
- Capital at the beginning of each sentence, for the word ‘I’, and proper nouns
- Punctuation at the end of each sentence
- Quotation marks when using dialogue
MATH:
Students are refining their addition and subtraction strategies, including solving story problems, and working towards accurate and efficient strategies that can be generalized to greater numbers. We will continue to focus on the mathematical practices of precision, making sense of problems, and persevering to solve them and constructing viable arguments to explain our mathematical thinking. We will also begin to investigate graphs and data in conjunction with our Tech project.
Over the next few weeks, students will:
- Add and subtract one and two digit numbers using models to help them visualize the regrouping concept.
- Use drawings, equations and models to solve one and two-step addition & subtraction problems.
- Collect, represent and interpret data using line plots, bar graphs and pictographs.
SCIENCE:
In science, we will continue our unit on weather. During this unit, students will:
- Conducting weather experiments
- Observing changes in weather over time
- Becoming familiar with instruments meteorologists use to monitor weather conditions
- Exploring the various types of clouds and the the weather they bring
- Gaining an understanding of the water cycle
- Gaining an understanding of how weather and changing seasons impact people, animals, and plants
- Gathering and analyzing data on the weather in different locations and in different seasons
- Use graphs and models to represent and interpret data
- Analyzing the ways severe weather contributes to catastrophic events (floods, wildfires, etc.)
