September 28th

Writing: We learned about how to take notes from various sources, such as articles and videos. We practiced jotting down key words so that we could use them in our writing. We also learned about the four types of sentences: interrogative, exclamatory, imperative, and declarative. We practiced writing each of these types of sentences using correct capitalization and end punctuation.

 

Science: We made observations about what living things can be found in two different schoolyard areas. Then we viewed live webcams to make observations about what living and nonliving things could be found in other habitats. We saw brown bears at a river in Alaska, gazelles and elephants at a waterhole in Africa, stingrays and fish at a tropical reef, and honeybees at a hive. The students loved this lesson!

Reading: This week we read articles about penguins living in Antarctica and a park ranger in the Smoky Mountains. We also read a fiction passage about an armadillo that was searching for the perfect habitat. While exploring these various texts we worked on identifying the main idea and supporting details, summarizing, and identifying key story elements. We also read with the purpose to practice fluency. 

Math: Graphing has been the main focus of this week. In addition to creating graphs, we have been working on answering word problems that go along with reading the graphs. We have been looking for key phrases within the word problems to help us determine how to solve them.

September 23

Reading:

This week we started out practicing having constructive conversations within a small group while discussing a read aloud. We will continue to practice and refine this skill throughout the school year. Then, on Thursday we started our new reading unit.  In this unit we will be reading texts about plants and animal habitats.  We are learning how to ask questions while reading to keep our mind focused, identifying the main idea and key details, and how to use context clues to determine the meaning of vocabulary.

Writing:

Our focus in writing is informational essays.  We have been learning about the parts of an informational essay (introduction, facts and details, and a conclusion) and how to include these within our own writings. 

Math:

In math this week we finished up our set of lessons on word problems and have moved onto data and graphing.  We also took our mid unit test over addition and subtraction on Friday. 

Science:

We continued our unit on plants.  This week we explored how different areas allow for growth of different plants.  We conducted an experiment to see how to tell how much water and sunlight plants need to grow and did our 2nd set of observations of our Marigold and Dill plants.  

This week we also enjoyed our “Game Time” class celebration, and we got to meet our 5th grade buddies!

September 15th

Writing: We shared our stories that were about our experiences with storms, and now we are getting ready to begin our next writing which is all about trees. Each student selected either Maple, Oak, Pine, or Apple trees to research and then write about.

Science: We are continuing our unit about plants. We have learned about plant needs and the parts of the plant. We used our knowledge about plants during our first set of observations to see how our seeds are doing under different conditions.

Reading: We have been discussing nonfiction text features such as captions, pictures, tables, graphs and maps. We are reading a class book called Hurricanes, and are continuing to practice annotating text to record our thinking. In addition, we talked about creating mental images we can create when listening to the poem “Who Has Seen the Wind?” During phonics time, we have been learning about inflectional endings of words, prefixes and r-controlled vowels.

Math: We wrapped up our review of subtraction strategies. Some methods we have covered are making a ten, counting back on a number line, fact families and using related facts in a number bond. We also started learning how to solve one-step word problems.

Dot Day: Check out some of the fun things we did to celebrate Dot Day!