Our fantastic All-Star last week was Dominic. He started the week by sharing things special to him. The first item he pulled out of his sharing sack was stitches he had removed in kindergarten from a head injury. He also shared a stuffed Dalmatian puppy he had used as part of a past Halloween costume when he was a firefighter and a lacrosse trophy. Dominic read aloud a portion of a chapter from a Harry Potter novel. He also enjoyed a special lunch with his lunch buddy on Thursday. We enjoyed having Dominic as our All-Star in Room 13!
Math Workshop
We are skipping units 5 and 6 for now. We started Unit 7. We will be learning about fractions. Although it is a short unit, we will spend a lot of time on each lesson. Students will not be expected to master all of the skills by the end of the unit, but we will spend enough time for students to feel comfortable with the skills. Last week we worked on modeling fractions with fraction bars and number lines. Students learned the definitions of numerator and denominator. We will continue to work on placing fractions greater than one on a number line as this is a very tricky concept for many. We start by teaching students to divide the number line into equal parts indicated by the denominator. For example, if the fraction we need to place on the number line is 5/4, we would have students divide the number line into fourths. Next, students would locate 1 whole. Students know that 1 whole in this case is equal to 4/4. Finally, they would be able to find 5/4. Below are some pictures of problems we worked on in class.
Writing Workshop
Students finished typing their persuasive essays. We visited the computer lab to print copies of our essays. We have one more project to complete to wrap up this Opinion Writing Unit. We will practice reading our essays aloud as a speech. Students will record themselves reading their essays aloud in AudioBoom and print a QR code. We hope to have both projects hanging in the hall soon for you to see.
Science
Students were very excited about the arrival of the crayfish. We began the unit learning how to pick up the crayfish. We had several brave students try this out right away. Students wrote about their initial observations of the crayfish as well.
Students also set up their mini-sprouter, and we have a class sprouter set up too. We are watching bush beans, popcorn seeds, sunflower seeds, and pea seeds in our sprouters. Students will be able to see the beginning stages of a plant soon. Groups also did a seed soak investigation. Students learned that wet seeds weigh more than dry seeds because the seeds soak up the water. From this investigation we will be able to take a closer look at the parts of a seed, including the seed coat, embryo, and cotyledon.
Our first Mystery Readers visited the classroom this week. Students were excited to guess who the Mystery Readers at the door might be. Thank you to Aloki's brother for kicking off our week and Lana's mom for ending our week. We look forward to more Mystery Readers throughout the month of March!
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