Catching up!

Oh wow, have we been busy little beavers! Over the past few weeks we have been immersed in many projects, experiments, presentations, and a plethora of other opportunities to apply our learning. We are wrapping things up, finally, so now you should start to see a few pics of finished work! Yeah! This post should bring you back up to speed on everything we've been up to.

Reading - This week we are wrapping up our novel study of Because of Winn-Dixie. During the time we've spend reading the book we've focused on developing a deeper understanding of characters and characteristics of reading / writing realistic fiction. Through this text along with our read alouds Hoot and Ruby Holler we've analyzed plot lines and how authors develop the story and characters effectively to totally draw us in.

Writing - We are in the final phase of drafting our realistic fiction stories in Writing Workshop! This week our anchor lessons are on how to craft an ending that ties into the problem and story arc (aka: plot line) and ties up loose ends from the story. Students have already spent quite a bit of time revising during our drafting, but we will take a final look at how to blend dialogue, action, and description of setting as we finalize our word choice. As this project comes to a close we will model and practice strategies for editing punctuation, spelling, and capitalization, especially with dialogue (which can be tricky).

Spelling - Our weekly spelling skill lessons are going great! Weekly words have been a challenge! :) Beginning this week we incorporated more work with these words and strategies for breaking them down into chunks vs memorizing letter by letter. Wednesday morning we spend some time chunking words, defining them, and making comparisons between the words and roots. It was great, and I think students' confidence with the words improved significantly!!! (Just a note on grading and report cards...students' spelling grades are not based on our weekly quizzes, but more so on using spelling strategies and word knowledge in everyday writing. Our weekly words allow us to work more with studying roots and their meanings, which is both a spelling and a reading skill.)

Math - We made it through our first Engage New York unit! We all agreed that the lessons were great...many activities to keep students involved and hands-on with the concepts we were studying, but they were lengthy and time consuming. The unit centered around everything to do with lines, angles, measuring lines and angles, and using lines and angles to find symmetry and classify triangles and quadrilaterals. As much as we enjoyed it, we are ready to take a break, get back to our Everyday Math, and restarting math workshop! On a teacher side note...Engage NY was a challenge, but it also stimulated some of the most powerful math opportunities for students for these standards that I've seen. WOW, can these kiddos work with angles!

Science - Our Land on Water unit has been a great opportunity to dig into (literally, excuse the pun) the water cycle and the effects water can have on soil. We have observed the effect of rain on bare soil, created our first stream table to observe how water can change course and drastically impact landscape. We will continue to study the components we are working with (humus, clay, sand, and gravel) and add other environmental impacts to our steam tables as we progress through the unit.

Have a fabulous weekend!!!