It has been another fabulous week with these great kids!
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In math we have begun unit 2. Unit two focuses on place value and on multi-digit multiplication and division. We also learn the traditional method of multiplication in this unit. Finally, something you remember from your own school days. :-) This week we discussed that our number system is a base ten number system. This means we use 10 digits to make our numbers and that each place is ten times bigger than the place before it. This unit shores up an understanding of magnitude from thousandths through the billions and for many children this unit reinforces how to say the name of a number if is larger than ten thousand or if it has a decimal.
In science this week we finished up our mini-inquiry with Mrs. Stuhr in the library. We had many different styles of presentations from a "talk show" to Google presentations. They were fun. In science we began designing our controlled experiment to investigate if we can change any of the variables in our electro-magnet to make it stronger. Stay tuned for our results.
In reading the students learned about onomatopoeia and hyperbole. We defined what both are and took notes in our mini-lesson sections of our Reader's Notebooks. While silent reading our own selected books, we searched for examples of both. The students were quite successful! We read and shared four poems that demonstrate strong hyperbole and today's Friday poem-of-the-week was a poem about Thanksgiving using hyperbole. We wrote our own short poems about Thanksgiving using hyperbole. I ate a mountain of mashed potatoes.
The students have been reading and reading and reading! I just love when they ask for more reading time. Some of the popular titles include: Maximum Ride, Wish, Nowhere Boy, and a whole bunch of Watt Key books: Alabama Moon, Hideout, Deep Water, and Terror at Bottle Creek.
In writing we are practicing punctuating direct quotes and we are learning about strategies to remember how to use and spell words such as it's and its. This week the daily oral language sentences covered some cool facts about tornadoes. For example tornadoes turn counterclockwise north of the equator, clockwise south of the equator, and they don't form within 4 degrees of the equator.
In writing this week the students are just about all wrapped up with their practice narratives. Some skills we worked on are: slowing down the action, adding internal thinking - thought shots, and giving details using figurative language. We also used the online thesaurus to help us change our less exciting verbs like walk to more effective verbs such as trudged.
Conversation starters:
onomatopoeia
He's a couch potato.
Place value
mini-inquiry
powers of 10
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