Week of October 9

Hi All,

Thank you to those of you who have responded to our pre-conference survey!  If you haven't yet responded, it's not too late.  We are looking forward to our conference time with you and your child.

We've been working with Mrs. Stuhr, our librarian, on learning research skills.  She is teaching us about the inquiry process.  Working in groups we have connected, wondered and have begun the research phase.  After we have taken notes we will work to create meaning, express, and reflect.

During math this week we built prisms and calculated volume by filling the prisms with centimeter cubes.  This phase of concrete learning should help children move to the abstract phase.  Next, we will use pictures of prisms to calculate volume.  Learning the appropriate unit for volume is always difficult for students.  They are still building their conceptual knowledge of units, square units, and cubic units.  It takes lots of experience to cement this learning.

In science this week we built straw compasses!  It took lots of patience and perseverance, but we did it!  We learned that the north pole of the magnet is attracted to the magnetic south of Earth, which just happens to be in the geographic north.  Wow!

During writing classes this week the students were given strategies for generating personal narrative writing.  We began by thinking about a person who matters to us, then we listed small moment stories about him or her and began writing about one. Next, we listed first times, last times, or times when we realized something and chose one to write about.  Finally, we thought about places that matter to us; we listed small moments that occurred in one of those places, we chose one and wrote about it.

Today in writing classes the students participated in an activity called Table Top Twitter. They read and reacted to examples of settings from pages in the book Charlotte's Web on chart paper.  We worked on adding detail to our own settings.  The Acadian homeroom will do this activity on Monday.

The students enjoyed the story An A from Miss Keller by Patricia Polacco. It that is a true story about Ms. Polacco's teacher who challenged her to write a personal narrative with strong emotion.

The students shared their writing resolutions on a Pear Deck. The goals were perfect and the list from the students

includes: included adding figurative language, learning how to use dialogue, grammar and spelling, and when to start a new paragraphs.

In reading this week we read about magnet and motors from a science magazine.  We took notes from the non fiction reading.  We listed three main facts, new vocabulary words we learned, questions we still had, and we wrote the most interesting thing we learned from the reading.

Our Friday reading classes always begin with a poem.  This week was "The Front Yard Where The Maple Tree Stands" We talked about the poem, the rhyme and rhythm, and the personification in the first stanza.  We brainstormed and shared our favorite fall activities.

Conversation starters:

• straw compass
• inquiry project
• magnetic north
• prisms and cubic centimeters
• butterflies in my stomach
• An A From Miss Keller
• Writing resolutions