December 15th

Wow!  Can you believe that it is the middle of December already?  Please read below to see what we have been working on in the classroom over the past couple weeks.

Readers' Workshop

In Readers' Workshop we have been working on formulating claims about our characters and providing reasons and evidence to support our claims.  We have been stating a claim, giving reasons for our claim and then providing evidence from the text to support our reasons.  The students are doing a great job of finding evidence to support their thinking.  We have been using our read aloud Fish in a Tree to state our claims about characters. This is now transferring into our opinion writing. 

Writers' Workshop

In writers' workshop we are working on writing opinion essays.  The students are reading about issues and then formulating their opinion. We are using multiple sources to provide reasons and evidence to support our opinions.  Our essays have a strong lead or hook paragraph, three reasons with evidence in the body, and then a closing with an echo.  Each week we will be tackling a different topic to write about. This week we are researching on rats and our question is "Does rats make good pets?"  Sorry if you child gets the idea that they need a pet rat at home.  

Today we focused on our hook.  How are we going to hook our readers to make them want to read our opinion piece?  We could do this by painting a picture, asking a question, giving background information, or sharing some statistics.  Then we wrote our lead with a hook, a claim, and a list of our reasons.  We have some amazing writers in our classroom.

Math

In Math we finished our unit on fractions.  Today we took our Unit 3 BA.  We had a lot of questions during the BA.  The BA results will be posted on Family Access by the end of the day Friday.  Please talk to your child and ask what was easy for them on the assessment and what was challenging.  We will send home the BA when everyone has had a chance to finish.

Social Studies

We finished our first unit on The First Americans and European Exploration.  To prepare for our first Social Studies BA we played a game called Kahoot (see pictures below).  Kahoot is a game where students answer multiple choice questions on their device and play against one another.  We had a lot of fun studying together.

We have now started our second unit on Colonial Life.  We have been studying the push and pull many people faced as they moved to the new world.  

Winter Party

On Thursday (12/22) around 1:45, we will be begin our Holiday Party.  We will be watching the Polar Express!! Around 2:30, we are going to break for a snack.  Students can bring something to drink from home. Please consider sending something with a lid.  Then we will continue the movie for the remainder of the afternoon. 

Important Reminders and Dates

• Permission Slips: Please return permission slips for our trip to Walled Lake Western if you have not done so already
• PTA:Please consider joining the PTA we currently only have a couple families that have joined.  You do not need to attend the meetings.  You can send in the PTA form with your small membership fee.
• December 22nd: Winter Party
• December 22nd - January 3rd: Winter Break