The students get so excited when I introduce the clues for our Mystery Readers. This week, we had Mr. Coffin, Ms. Houle and Mr. Barnes. There has been some very close competition between the books read so far!
We started working on our St. Patrick's Day writing this week. To get the students thinking about how to catch the tiny green prankster, we read a few stories and did a lot of brainstorming together.
As a class, we wrote a short story about how to catch a leprechaun. The students focused on sequencing events and using different sentence starters.
Then the students worked on their own version of how they would catch a leprechaun. After writing their sloppy copies they read their stories to a friend, checking for capitalization, punctuation and spelling. Their partner was asked to give them some feedback and help them with their editing.
This week, we focused on homophones. We started by pulling these words out of our Spell-a-thon lists and then the students were given homework to find other homophones in order to make a class list. They added the definition of homophones to their Language Arts notebook and illustrated a few examples.
We have been working on the Spell-a-thon words a little bit at a time by focusing on a few words a day. The student have also been testing their classmates!
MATH
We finished our Number Sense unit and the students completed a test. They demonstrated their knowledge of greater than/less than, how to represent three digit numbers in a variety of ways, and completed addition and subtraction questions with and without regrouping.
We started our Multiplication unit by reviewing even/odd numbers and looking at patterns when skip counting.
SOCIAL
We completed our study of the Tunisian culture by spending an afternoon enjoying some food and participating in a few craft activities. The students tried baklava, flat bread with zaatar seasoning and olive oil, dates and couscous. They also created bean mosaics and learned how to weave!
SCIENCE
We started our next Science unit called "Building and Testing a Variety of Materials". We have based the unit on the TV show "Survivor". The students will be involved in a lot of hands on activities while completing challenges as a tribe. This week, they worked together to come up with their tribe names, picked their buffs, had pictures taken and worked on their title pages.
We talked about fair testing and the students completed an activity demonstrating what it means to conduct a "fair test".
The tribes received their first "tree mail" and completed a challenge to find out if arches or squares would support more mass. They found that arches support more mass because the weight is distributed evenly. They also learned how to write up a lab by making a hypothesis, listing the materials, making observations and writing a conclusion.
AMAZING RACE
STUDENT OF THE WEEK
