Monday, January 21, 2013

It's Been a While!

I am so sorry to be missing in action the past few weeks.  Our class has been so busy!

In writing, we have been working on personal essays.  Students chose a topic they felt strongly about, and wrote an essay supporting their thesis.  Some of the big ideas that were written about were:  family is the most important thing, kids should be able to choose a sport they want to play, students should be able to play video games for as long as they want, surprises are always good, and many others!  Once they wrote an introduction, they wrote three supporting body paragraphs, and then a closing paragraphs.  We will be taking what we learned from personal essays to start writing an informational piece, that we will organize into books!

Math has been lots of fun!  We have been working our way through word problems that have multiple steps.  We have learned that reading, and rereading the word problem is a good thing!  We also learned how important it was to check our answers with the original question.  We found that many times, we answered one part of the question, but there was still something else we needed to do.  Checking our answer and asking ourselves, "Does that answer make sense with the question?" will help us to be sure we have correctly answered the problem.

We have also be adding and subtracting multiple digit numbers.  You have probably seen the dot arrays the kids were using to "regroup".  The dot arrays are just another way of explaining and showing how new groups need to be made when subtracting.  The squares represent 100's, the lines represent 10's, and the circles represent 1's.  Students are starting to "see" how to use these when subtracting.

In science, we are applying what we learned from our study of text features, to read and understand science texts.  Students used a science text book to locate information about ecosystems.  The students LOVED looking through the text at all of the neat photographs and information that was in it.  While they were reading, they needed to read captions, diagrams, and charts to find information they needed.  They also practiced using context clues to find meanings of vocabulary words.  Finally, we are getting to wrap up our Package the Pringle Project!  Yea!  All information from our classes and the classes from Hong Kong are ready for us to calculate the final score of each team and each class.  Students will be using calculators to find the score, then analyze their data to determine the winner!

As you can see, we have been busy, but this post hasn't even covered all we have been doing!  I promise you will not have to wait as long for the next post!

Enjoy the rest of the day!

Mrs. Burns