The Week April 30

Daffodils are growing on our playground! 

Dandelions are coming up too! 

Classroom News

This week sure was busy! I didn't get a chance to take as many photos as usual, but I have include what I did take. At the end of May I will begin our end of year literacy and math assessments. Ms. Caswell, Ms. Abair and myself will meet to discuss student placement for next year.  In deciding a child's placement for next year we consider academic, social and behavioral strengths and weaknesses, along with class size and ratio of boys and girls. At the end of May, we will have a "Preview Day" where students will meet their teacher and classmates for the next year. Because of the numerous snow days accumulated this year, the date for "Preview Day" hasn't been determined yet. I will keep you updated as the date is finalized. 

We just finished up a technology project that helps to showcase our learning from our States of Matter project. Students ended the unit by writing a claim about heating and cooling and the effect it has on materials. We used our evidence gathered in the unit, and drew pictures to explain our thinking. Our class is working with Mr. Hance to create a movie where the students work is displayed.  I hope to have it up on the website soon! 

Math 

We continued working on our penguin project this week. We worked with story problems that challenged students to use several different strategies and stretch their thinking.  Students drew pictures, wrote words and equations to develop and show their thinking.

 We continued to work at our geometry stations and learned a new stations which challenged us to create 3D shapes using nets.  What 3D shape will this net make?

Readers' Workshop

This week we worked in our book clubs. Students gathered information about their topic through pictures and words.  Some of our topics include dogs, cats, Egypt and sea creatures! Students learned how to take notes and evaluate if books were good resources or not. We continued to practice our book club rules and enjoyed sharing our new information with others! 

Writers' Workshop

In writing, we brushed up on ways to begin and end our nonfiction books. We made lots of connections to our past units of study! We reviewed interesting ways to hook a reader and get them interested in our books. We also practiced ways to end our books by noticing how other authors do it. We read some digital mentor texts this week. We did a shared writing piece that helped us to try out what we call the WOW fact. We shared one last interesting fact at the end, and then practiced a concluding sentence.  

Science 

On Wednesday we began our last science unit for the year... boohoo! We began with our phenomenon which sparked students interest and got them thinking! Our driving question for this unit of study is- what's outside our door, and how do we all live together? Students took a long walk outdoors noticing plants, animals, rocks, playground equipment, seeds, holes and much, much more! We took lots of pictures  as we walked and used these photos to sort and classify the things we noticed. Students worked in partnerships, and in small groups to share ideas, give feedback and come to agreement on the groupings of their photos.