Classroom Update 10/12
The Fall Parent Conference SignUp Genius link is posted on the main page of our classroom website. If you have any difficulty, please email me with any questions.
Coming up next week:
Monday: No School
Tuesday: Ms. Molloy & Ms. Fuller out for Professional Development
Wednesday: Chorus & Conservatory (music lessons)
Thursday:
Friday: Family Immigration Paragraphs due; presentations will begin; FunRun 10:40 - 11:40
Reading: Students worked very hard on completing their DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) this week. This will help shape support and teaching strategies and allow us to support your student most appropriately. We continue to work through our unit on character and theme. Students are learning more and more to recognize character struggles are not really about what the character wants deep inside, not an 'action' they want to do. For instance, a character struggle is not really about wanting to make the baseball team, it is about proving themselves to their older brother who seems to be good at everything.
Writing: This week students worked very hard to write the first draft of their stories scene by scene. These scenes are 'show not tell' of a particular event in the story. They have been sharing their work with classmates and you can see they are all very proud of the work they have accomplished.
Math: We began our unit on multiplication this week. We've focused on multiplying with 10s, 100s and 1000s using mental math, and looked at how an area model can be used to solve a multiplication problem. Next week we will begin to introduce the other methods and work our way to the traditional algorithm.
Science: We ONCE AGAIN learned this week about experiments gone wrong! When we planted our Wisconsin Fast Plants last Friday we expected to see amazing plant growth over the weekend. Well, the only thing we saw was mold! Out of the 21 plant quads, only ONE of them had any growth. It could have been a combination of bad soil and old seeds. SO, we will try again this week. We will plant with newly purchased seeds and soil and hopefully have success. We'll keep you posted!
Social Studies: We had a bit of review of our immigration unit so far and discussed the idea of forced immigration. We talked about leaving one's country to come to America was not a choice for slaves and this practice of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade had a significant impact on our country's development. It can be an difficult concept for young people to understand. We also discussed other reasons people are 'forced' to leave their countries.