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| Some of us have really had enough of the snow! |
It's almost spring! The February blog update is buried under three feet of snow, so I apologize for that.
Here's what we've been up to!
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| Ordering Adjectives |
Reading-We have covered and reviewed so many topics including theme and finding common themes across fables, tall tales, and our books. We also examined some figurative language through our readings, such as similes, metaphors and hyperbole's. A few weeks ago students compiled a book made of idioms such as: it's raining cats and dogs, hit the lights, and you are on thin ice. We have been reading a whole class book called There's A Boy in the Girl's Bathroom. The name at first makes the student's laugh and while the book has plenty of humor, it is a story about a boy's journey to gain acceptance by his peers, teacher and father. We have had some great discussions about friendship, kindness, responsibility, and helping each other. Since we have had so much practice with themes across many different types of literature, we are now thinking about how can we write about them comparatively using compare and contrast signal words such as; similarly, alike, on the other hand, etc.
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| Working in teams to come up with adjectives |
Writing- This past trimester, students gave their opinions on many different topics from the best gift, to their stance on school uniforms, lunch lines in our own cafeteria, hot lunches, pets and more. Students were able to write a five paragraph essay by stating their opinions and giving three detailed reasons with examples to support their opinion. This time really helped us to understand how to get our writing organized. Our next unit is expository writing. Students are already diving in with a presentation on the person they chose for their biography. We will be continuing work on our compare and contrast writing, as students need to be able to write comparatively about two non fiction topics that are related.
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| Tall Tale Research |
Math-We have just finished our unit on fractions. This always tends to be a difficult unit for students. There are so many concepts for them to learn in one chapter, finding common denominators, adding, subtracting and multiplying fractions, reducing, and finding equivalent fractions, but we made it! This is a skill that will need to be reinforced throughout the rest of the year and will show up in their math for years to come. We are moving on to decimal notation and finding equivalent decimals for fractions. This unit consists of two chapters. The first is about understanding decimals and their correlation to fractions, the second is how to use decimals.
S.S. We have finished our unit on the South and will be moving on to the Midwest soon.
Science- We completed our matter unit a few weeks ago and just finished a two week unit on force and motion. In order to demonstrate the fact that forces come in pairs (pushes and pulls) and that we can predict the speed and direction of an object based on force and mass, students conducted experiments by pushing each other around on scooters, making ramps of different elevations to push toy cars down and also used a model of a sled to pull different weights in.
I'd like to congratulate Caroline and Betti for being our classroom spelling bee champions. It was quite the competition that lasted for almost an hour in our classroom. Both advanced to the school spelling bee where they competed against the fifth graders and other fourth graders from our school. Betti was the runner up of the school bee. I am so proud of them both!
