We are about halfway through second trimester already! Can you believe it? Grades close the beginning of March and report cards will follow shortly. Another mid-trimester behavior progress report will be coming home next week in the Friday Folders. Please look over the learner behaviors and discuss any areas where improvement can be made. We still have time to reflect and put forth our best effort. The past two weeks, in Reader's Workshop we have moved on from text structure of nonfiction articles to stated main idea and implied main idea of a text. Making inferences can be challenging. We have been using the following chart to organize our thoughts. This chart and even using this terminology when orally responding to question that requires inferring really slows down our thoughts and helps us organize and come to a conclusion based on our schema. We will continue to work on main idea, supporting details and inferring next week.
In Writer's Workshop, we have moved away from expert writing and moved back toward constructed response. We back pedaled a bit with RACE and instead of continuing with RACE following a text, we practiced responding to a question using RACE to really understand all parts. Two questions we practiced with were "Explain how you could make a new student feel welcome at LaPerche." and "Describe how you could stay busy on a rainy day." We worked on restating and answering the question...There are many ways _________. Supporting our answer with three details. Providing a buddy sentence to go with a detail, and then finally a concluding statement. Now that we have had a chance to really understand the format of RACE, we moved on to using RACE to answer a constructed response question based on a nonfiction article. I read and modeled an article about Leopards and why they are endangered, how to take notes and pull out important information from an article. The students did a great job applying this skill to their own article, Endangered Species: The Gorilla." In Math, we finished up the 8's and 9's tables, decomposing known facts and learned a few more strategies to attack problems that we do not have memorized yet. Check out Theo explaining using a known 10's fact to solve a 9's multiplication sentence. We are the the point in math where the students have been given MANY strategies to attack unknown problems. Our hope with common core math is that they learn the strategies and choose the one that works for them. It is our end goal that these facts will become memorized. Many students are excelling on the timed fast facts and are asking if they need to show a strategy even if they have it memorized. The answer is sometimes. There are times where students will be asked to explain their math in the math lesson, as well as during RICAS. Often, they will ask the students to show and explain how they got their answer. Memorizing facts is not enough of an explanation for these tasks. We will continue to work on this. We also began two step word problems this week. Though they have come up here and there on homework, this was the first week where the strategy was explicitly taught. The focus is on separating what information we have and what we are being asked to do with it. Math vocabulary helps us know whether to add, subtract, multiply or divide. We will continue this skill. In Science, we finished Wheel and Axle systems, as well as how to make a cart roll from here to there. Students were given materials (see Emma's update above) and asked to make a cart that would roll down a ramp, with no further instructions. The first session was 30 minutes, with no directions. Many students taped the wheel and axle system to their index cards and became frustrated that the tape would not allow the axle to turn. Lily was the first student to suggest trying to attack the axle to the index card with a binder clip, or bearing. Way to go Lily! Once Lily suggested this, many were able to update their designs and have a cart that would roll down a ramp.
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April 2019
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