Happy Friday all!
Starting the week with Connections and learning about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was a great way to think about our roles in our community! Today, as a class, we continued this conversation looking at ways we can help build not only our classroom community but our community at Cole and beyond. We tied this lesson to our work discussing bullying and how to be an upstander if they see bullying at all. It is hard to sometimes stand up to bullies, but our discussion was around how not standing up when we know something is wrong is sometimes just a bad as being the bully! Great discussions were had! This week in math we really dug into subtracting fractions with unlike denominators and how we need to "trade" wholes for fractions in order to subtract at times. This is a difficult concept, we used fraction tiles and lots of modeling to help us conceptualize this! We also worked on a fraction escape room! In this escape room, we had to use what we have learned about equivalent fractions, ordering and adding/subtracting fractions to escape! Great teamwork here! We ended the week with independent work on an Exemplar, which is a multi-step word problem that dealt with fractions. Proud of their work in this area! In reading this week, we looked at some test taking strategies. We read an article about fire and then answered some multiple choice questions by going back in the text and finding details to support our answers. We crossed off answers that made no sense in order to limit our possibilities, then used our skills to go back and find facts. We will be continuing with this excerpt next week as we look at an Open Response strategy A.C.E. - Answer, Cite, Explain. Looking forward to some great effort as we learn to back up our answers with evidence from the text! We have also had some fun this week with Mr. Terupt Falls Again. The students are definitely dealing with some middle school issues, which lead to some laughter and giggles, but also had us realizing there are many ways to deal with peer pressure. Mr. Terupt got engaged to Ms. Newbury this week and has assigned a major project to his class - to plan their wedding! Needless to say, we have had lots of laughs and discussion about this! Be sure to ask your child about this book! In Science, I couldn't be any prouder of the effort students showed as they took their computer-based Science assessment on the Earth, Moon and Stars. Some still need to review the difference between waxing (building) and waning (disappearance)of the moon, but overall I was impressed with their analysis of some graphs and interpretation of questions. I printed a blank copy of the test and indicated just the answers your child got wrong. They are in their Friday folders for your review! We are now going to be focused on the Earth's Systems, including the layers of the Earth and atmosphere! In Writing, we looked to add dialogue and learned the proper ways to use quotations in our writing. Students are beefing up their narratives and we hope to get them finalized next week, so we can celebrate before February vacation! As mentioned in my earlier email this week, Wednesday is WORLD READ ALOUD DAY! We are celebrating in Room 15 all week with many parents and other teachers from our building coming in and reading to us! If you would like to participate, please just shoot me an email and we will coordinate a convenient time! Thanks for all you do for our class! Enjoy the weekend! Cheers! Maura Important Dates to Remember:
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Happy Friday!
Wow! What a week we had! We came back from our long weekend and dug right back into our hard work! We used flashlights and legos to look at how the position of the sun impacts our shadows. We then took it outside on Wednesday and measured our own shadows at 9, 12:30 and 2:30 to extend this learning! We realized through this work that when the sun rises in the East our shadows are cast to the West and as it sets in the West our shadows cast East. We also noticed our shadows were the shortest at noon when the sun is directly overhead! We are finishing up our work on the Earth, Moon and Stars and will have an assessment next week. Students have been given study guides to help them begin reviewing the important concepts! We will then move on to the layers of the Earth and the Earth's atmosphere! In Math, a challenging week as we looked finding common denominators, so we could add and subtract fractions. Subtraction is definitely challenging us, we used fraction tiles to help model this concept concretely, before moving to paper/pencil. We will be focused on this some more next week and then will be looking at benchmark fractions and some line plots before moving into multiplication and division of fractions! Proud of student effort so far. As students work to find least common multiples to help them when adding and subtracting fact fluency really comes into play ! Keep up the fluency work at home - confidence is key! In reading, I was so happy to see the level of engagement today during our literature circle time. Students are definitely digging in to The War That Saved My Life. Be sure to ask your child about Ada and Jamie and how they think their relationship with Ms. Smith is going. Will Ada learn to ride Butter? Will Jamie go back to Mam? Lots happening and great predictions around the room! We also finished up our work with the Fiction Signposts, this week looking at Memory Moments. Students will now be looking for these signposts as they continue reading for their literature circle discussions! Today we had a few special guests in our class! We had the high school peer leaders in to help us look at goals and how we can set steps to achieve in order to meet our goals. I think the high school students were impressed with some of the goals our class came up with! We look forward to having them back in a few months! We also had the unbelievable opportunity to SKYPE with author Shelly Brown and her daughter Maddie, who was the main character in our recent read aloud Mustaches for Maddie. I can't tell you how impressed I was with the details our class remembered from the book and the questions they asked both Mrs. Brown and Maddie. Their new book Willa and the Whale comes out March 3rd, for those interested you can pre-order on Amazon now. Next week, we will be working with our partners to glow and grow our personal narratives to hopefully put the finishing touches on our work! We will plan a celebration of our writing as soon as this is accomplished! We can't wait to share our stories with you! Friday folders came home with comments today as well as a GREEN permission slip for our field trip to the Museum of Science on Wednesday, February 12th. Also, a reminder if you were going to order any books from Scholastic, I will be processing our class order Monday morning so please be sure to get your orders in. Our class code is QBJCX and you can go to scholastic.com/bookclubs to order! Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend! Cheers! Maura Important Dates to Remember:
Happy Friday everyone!
We started this week with a fabulous Community Meeting reminding us of why we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I hope as we all enjoy our long and restful weekend we can reflect on the many freedoms we have due to people like Dr. King who have been leaders our country to build communities for change! We finished our class read aloud Mustaches for Maddie this week. We all wore mustaches to celebrate Maddie's resilience and her lessons of kindness. We are so excited because the authors have committed to skype with us, hoping to get it on our schedule next week! It will be great to hear more about Maddie and other books they have written! The class has now begun Mr. Terupt Falls Again the sequel to Because of Mr. Terupt. Be sure to ask your child about these books. What do they think about the characters? What lessons are the authors trying to convey? We are also continuing to work on the Fiction Signposts. This week we took a look at "Again and Again". When an author repeats words or phrases we shop stop and ask ourselves "Why does this keep showing up?" "Why is the author trying to stress this?" All students decided to read The War That Saved My Life as their historical fiction book. So we are using this book to dig into the signposts and also work on chapter summaries to get us ready for summer reading for Middle School. I can't wait to hear students discussing this book tomorrow! I love that they are begging to read more. They initially set 4 chapters as the week's goal, but then asked if we could extend to 6, and then some even wanted more! Going forward students will be working with a partner to set their weekly goals for discussion. In this week's Friday folder you will find a book order form as well as the information about ordering yearbooks. There are some FABULOUS books in this month's order. A few I would highlight :Song for a Whale, What was the Berlin Wall? , How Full is Your Bucket?, Inside Out and Back Again, Lousiana's Way Home, Notorious, The Friendship War, Other Words for Home and Terri Libsenson Trio (graphic novel set - dealing with friends, frenemies and feeling left out) to name a few. Orders are due by Friday, January 24th (next Friday). Students have been doing a great job with fractions this week. We are working hard adding and subtracting with like denominators. We have also worked with converting mixed to improper and improper to mixed. Next week our focus will continue to work at adding and subtracting, but we will need to find common denominators to solve next week's problems! In Science, we dug into what causes the amount of daylight in different parts of the world as well as how are shadows change throughout the day. The Earth's rotation and tilt on its axis really impact our lives. We talked about how different our lives would be if we lived along the Equator where their days always have about 12 hours. They don't see the longer days in the summer as we do, ask your child about this! We are working hard on our Narratives, hoping to finish up on the next week or so, and then we will celebrate our hard work with another writing celebration! Stay tuned for details! As a class, we have been overly chatty since we returned from break, and we needed to have a class meeting to hit the "reset" button. We are working on a class goal of "WORKING TOGETHER". Our focus is on being kind to EVERY student in our class, realizing that we all have different strengths and weaknesses, and we need to celebrate our differences rather than use them to separate us. We discussed we don't have to always LOVE all of our classmates, but we do need to like and respect each other. I will be holding them very accountable for this as we seek to refocus for a strong end to the school year! They are great kids and need to celebrate each other more instead of teasing, which sometimes has led to hurt feelings! Thank you as always for all of the support from home! Have a wonderful, restful long weekend! Maura Important Dates to Remember
Good afternoon!
Well yesterday we definitely got that burst of winter to remind us we are in New England, but it may feel like Spring this weekend! Hoping we can all enjoy it a bit! Room 15 dove into Fractions this week. We started by just exploring playing a fraction cookie game using pattern blocks and the explored some more using fraction bars as we started to look at equivalent fractions. NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) has some great interactive games students can play to work on matching fractions to a diagram, as well as games to find equivalent fractions. We spent some time on on the NCTM Illumination site playing concentration This is a game they can play by themselves or can play against you! We also have a game of "UNO" using equivalent fractions and I am happy to send it home over the weekend or during the week for a night if you'd like to play with your child. We ended the week looking at factors & multiples, finding the Least Common Multiple and Greatest Common Factor to get ready to start adding fractions next week! Great effort so far! We continue to work on our Fiction Sign Posts looking at Tough Questions and Words of the Wiser this week. Sometimes in a story a character who is probably older and wiser takes the main character aside and gives them serious advice. When this happens we should stop and ask "What's the life lesson, and how might it affect the character?" Students had some great discussions about these questions. We used an excerpt from Riding Freedom one of our books from our book tasting to dig into this strategy. Speaking of our book tasting, our Starbooks Cafe was a big hit. I have an awful lot of excited kiddos ready and raring to get going on historical fiction next week! I know I cannot wait for the discussions as they learn more about the interesting characters in their books. Once again, thank you for the Amazon card which allowed me to purchase enough of The War The Saved My Life, so that all students who wrote this was their first choice, the book they "had to read", will be able to begin on Monday! Happy Readers = Happy Teacher ! :) In Writing, we started looking at different types of conclusions that can be used for narratives. We are using examples from different picture books to give us some ideas about how we might make our endings more exciting! I can't wait to see how students revise this important part of their stories! In Science, we continue to work on individual google slide presentations on a planet and dug into gravity this week. We also started to look at the patterns of day and night and how the Sun and Moon impact these patterns! Students are doing a better job asking questions and making connections to what they already know. Looking forward to another full week next week! Have a wonderful weekend! Maura Important Dates to Remember: Monday, January 13 - Community Meeting 9AM Wednesday, January 15 - Field trip to South Shore Art Center - All students need to bring a peanut free bagged lunch Monday, January 20 - Martin Luther King Jr Day - NO SCHOOL Happy New Year everyone!
I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break! We have had two busy days, getting back into the swing of things! We have lots to accomplish the rest of this year and will really be digging in on Monday! In Math, we have been reviewing what we learned about quadrilaterals and triangles and next week we will be diving into FRACTIONS! We will be adding, subtracting, multiplying and even dividing fractions this year! Lots of fun activities to help us learn some great strategies and we will continue our spiraling review with our math menus as well. In reading, we continue to work on fiction signposts. So far we have looked at Contrasts and Contradictions and AHA Moments. The next one will be Tough Questions - this is when a character asks themselves or someone else a question that makes us wonder. Many times these tough questons can lead us to the internal conflict of a book! Students are doing a nice job with these, and we discuss them as we share our class read aloud Mustaches for Maddie. Be sure to ask your child what they think of Maddie, a girl that likes to wear mustaches when she gets nervous, a girl we just found out has a brain tumor! Next week, we will be having another book tasting as we get ready to focus on some historical fiction! I can't wait to see what they think of some of the titles I have chosen for them to "taste"! Students are working hard on a google slide presentation on one of the planets as we continue our work on the Earth's Systems in Science. In Social Studies, we will be looking at the impact of slavery on the colonies which always brings on some great discussions! Students are working hard on their personal narratives as well. Before break we worked on creating effective leads and this week we looked at "Invigorating Verbs", how we can find some "blah" sentences in our writing and spice them up with better, more precise verbs! I have been very pleased with their effort to raise the level of their writing! Looking forward to a FULL week of school next week! Have a wonderful weekend! Maura Important Dates to Remember:
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March 2020
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