Week 32

This week was all about collaboration!  Our final reading unit was launched on Monday.  Students were split up into small research groups.  Readers got themselves ready for the research work by first looking over easier texts to get an over view of their topics and to search for subtopics.  In math we began our last unit of the year on, geometry.  Students worked together to learn cooperatively about shapes and then shared their learning with the class.  During writing workshop students wrote 5 paragraph persuasive essays about their spring vacations.  We began a new unit, "Cinderella around the world."  We will be investigating the question, "Why has Cinderella captured the hearts of people all around the world?"  Finally, this class ROCKED their first SBAC test session on Thursday.

Week 31

Happy Spring Vacation!!

Week 30

We launched our week off with a pancake party!  Each drop of our syrup was thoroughly enjoyed and relished!  We continued our work on persuasive writing.  We are crafting five paragraph essays and using lots of details and evidence to support our thesis.  In reading workshop we talked about how all main characters travel along a "story mountain."  Readers expect that a character will face a problem that gets bigger and bigger, reaches a turning point, then is resolved.  Students worked through their fiction books to locate all of the problems that their characters resolved.  In math our focus of the week was finding the area of objects.  We measured all sorts of things around the classroom.  In our mystery science lesson we learned about different types of bridges.  Next week students will get the opportunity to build their own, while testing its integrity with pennies!