September 17-21, 2018

Writing: Finishing up and editing our personal narrative draft. We worked on replacing “boring” words, adding dialogue, and revising our leads. Spelling word work was also introduced. If you would like to see the list, it can be found here.

Reading: Talked about how readers make predictions, make inferences, and ask questions. I read the book The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg to elicit questions. Students recorded their questions at stopping points during the interactive read aloud. After reading, we had a lingering question...Who is the stranger? The kiddos met with a reading group to discuss their thinking and to put clues from the text together to figure out who the stranger could be.

We also read two more bluebonnet books: Step Right up and Keith Haring: The Boy Who Just Kept Drawing.

Math: Exploring a wide array of strategies for addition and subtraction. This week, we focused on addition and subtraction on an open number line. We do not teach the kids the standard algorithm for addition and subtraction until later. As tempting as it is, please do not teach it to them yet. We find that developing number sense and number flexibility leads to much greater understanding. Many kids “know” the standard algorithm but do not really know why it works!

Science: Experimenting with changes in matter. Specifically, this week we looked at changes in matter due to heat. We did a class wide demo watching a pot of ice melt on a burner and subsequently turn into gas as it boiled and steamed.

On Wednesday, we went outside to watch as an ice cube turned from a solid to a liquid in the sun vs. in the shade

ESLOT: We followed the engineering design cycle to design a house like that in the story "Three Little Pigs". Some groups had toothpicks (house of straw), some had sticks (craft sticks), and some had bricks (craft bricks). They had to do some major problem solving and work together as a team. Next week, we will test them out to see which designs are able to withstand the blowing wind!

Coming up next:

Writing: Kids will continue to edit and peer review. Then, start on final copies!

Reading: Story elements in fiction, more with inferences, and summaries

Math: More with addition, subtraction, and Place Value - Representing Numbers to 9,999

Science: Begin exploring matter mixtures. Thank you to all of you who have generously signed up to bring things for science activities on sign up genius! It’s for use during our mixtures study which we will start this week.

Social studies: We'll take an imaginary trip to the White House as an introduction to our national government.