Week of October 17-21

As a reminder, this week is Red Ribbon Week! Be sure to remind your child to dress in support of our themes! Please remember to speak with your child each day this week about the importance of saying no to drugs so we can reinforce the message both at home and at school.

Monday: Wear red

Tuesday: Wear a hat

Wednesday: Wear sunglasses

Thursday: Wear bright colors

Dates to Remember:

October 21-28: Fall Break

Here's what we're learning this week!

Reading: During reading this week, we will review how to find the theme of a story, how to locate important information in a passage, and how to use textual evidence to support our thinking after reading a passage.

Writing: During writing this week, we will do several "short writes" to continue practicing the skill of embedding different themes into our writing.

Word Study: After analyzing student writing, I've noticed a need for teaching of the word study rules for adding -ed and -ing to verbs. Thus, we began practicing last week and we will continue to practice these rules this week. The hope is that it will begin to carry over into student writing.

Math: We are starting a new unit this week on decimal place value and operations. We will begin this week by learning how to read and write decimals in various forms. Then we will study the relationships between place value positions (e.g., 0.01 is 1/10 of 0.1). Please look for your child's recent math test in the Tuesday folder, sign and return it to school. Thank you in advance. 

Social Studies: We will continue to learn about how Exploration began, the motives for exploration, the results of exploration, and the impact it had on Native Americans.

It's going to be a short week--only 4 days until Fall Break! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. 

Recent Learning Events

The following pictures will show you much of what has been happening in our classroom during social studies over the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!

 

These students are partnered up together with two Native American regions. They examined the picture and read the text to determine ways in which to depict the cultural characteristics of their assigned regions.

Every student was put into a group to make a mural on a Native American culture region.Using their graphic organizers they were able to illustrate that attributes of their culture region including shelter, environment, food, and artifacts.

For this activity, students were able to examine the 3  most common series of migration to the Americas. They analyzed actual evidence from site cards, a map, a globe, and background on the theories to determine whether they believed the original Native Americans came from across the Atlantic Ocean, along the coast down the Pacific Ocean, or across a land bridge during the Ice Age.  Students then had the opportunity to debate with one another about which theory they believe to be true, as well as the opportunity to piece together their own theory of migration. It was a really cool lesson! 

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For this lesson, students had an opportunity to put together a pic collage or a brochure depicting the Eastern Woodlands Native American tribal cultures.

 Finally, today the students had an opportunity to act out scenes from pictures showing the interactions between Native Americans and explorers . I then interviewed with kids as though they were actually living during that time. It was a lot of fun and it was interesting to hear them and for how the people in these images might have felt during their interactions.

 

 

Top Secret Problem 10-3

For those who would like to work on it at home, here is this week's top secret problem!