Week of December 10

This week our reading classes took notes on and discussed THEME.  Theme is the message lesson that the author is trying to give us.  Mrs. Conley read aloud Surfer Chick by Kristy Dempsey and The Junkyard Wonders and An Orange for Frankie written by Patricia Polacco.  Common themes in all three books include: believing in yourself, teamwork, overcoming challenges, perseverance, and treating others with kindness.  Students will be writing about the theme in their own novels in their Reading Notebooks.

In writing the students are creating their own vocabulary pages.  We continue to work with new,   strong vocabulary words.  Our word of the week this week in class is zany.  For this assignment the students find new words in the own books that they are reading.  They write the sentences down from their books. We look up the definition, part of speech, pronunciation and then we write our own 10 word sentence using the new word. There are some challenge choices that include finding a prefix, suffix, antonym, synonym, and origin of the word. We will share our vocabulary pages with each other by playing a 'vocab' game while listening to a song titles Word Play :)

In math this week we reviewed the big ideas in unit 2 to prepare for our assessment.  We had a rousing team competition to help us review place value, powers of 10, estimating with extended math facts using powers of ten, and the traditional method of multiplication.  While many children are now comfortable with this new method, there are a few children who are working to make the transition.  This is one skill where you did actually learn it like they did!  If your child is still feeling a bit uncertain with the change, please feel free to help your child practice.  The more experience they have, the more at ease they will be.   Partial quotient division will be our next skill. 

In science this week, we finished up our Magnets and Motors unit.  We played a Kahoot game and watched Bill Nye Electricity to help us review the essential learnings in this unit.  They are:

• I understand how magnets push and pull.
• I can explain connections between electricity and magnets.
• I understand that magnets have opposite poles that may be used to determine direction.
• I recognize that an electromagnet can be used to make motors and generate electricity.
• I can demonstrate an understanding of the priority vocabulary for the Magnets and Motors Unit.

We will take our assessment early next week before beginning our study of biomes. 

Congratulations to Adea Cobaj and Gavin Rich.  They are our November Students of the Month.  Their classmates awarded this honor for their exemplary classroom and school citizenship.  We are very proud of them. 

Conversation starters:
The Junkyard Wonders
Hold you horses.
Kahoot - magets
Bill! Bill! Bill!
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