Week of September 26-30

Hello Everyone!

Our final week of September was a busy one!  We launched our Reader's Workshop, had our Unit 1 Math Assessment, practiced math on-line using the Chromebooks, spent time typing up our written work, and traced our forest animal for our next art project. It was a very busy week indeed.

              

LITERACY

This week we read the story “If You Had a Million” which artfully combined the teaching of money with the entertainment of a fantasy story.  The students were reminded of the equivalent values of money as the story highlighted the cumbersome nature of large amounts of small denominations, such as the difference between carrying around a $100 bill and 10,000 pennies.  The story led us to the convenience of checks and banks and the meaning of interest, both interest earned when you keep your money in the bank and interest paid when you borrow money from the bank.  It all culminated with the students learning that the interest earned on $1,000,000 would be enough money to live off.  

Our comprehension skill with this story was realism versus fantasy. Our recent work with genre made this week's concept a breeze, so we just made a simple t-chart in our notebook and practiced locating examples of both realism and fantasy in our story.

On Wednesday, we launched our Reader's Workshop!

We started by setting up our Reader's Notebook and learning the expectations and purpose for our Reader's Workshop.

First, we glued the expectations for our workshop on the first page of our notebook.

                                                  

Next, we glued our 3rd Grade Reading CAFE reminder, showing the various aspects of being a good reader. 

                                        

 Finally, each of us drew a self-portrait sketch in our notebook, in order to show ourselves as readers who think. 
               

The next day I introduced the concept of writing a summary.  In order to help the students understand the format for writing a good summary, we did a fun little drawing in our notebook that helps us visualize the format.

             

             

Then, we read our first chapter in our novel Class Clown. Once we were finished we wrote our first summary.

In order to have a solid understanding of what a summary is, I contrasted the idea with that of a retell.

A summary would include only the main events (main ideas) in the order they occurred...

Whereas a retell, would include as many details from the story as you can remember.  

This is a very important thing to distinguish.  As a result, we spent a great deal of time discussing the difference between main ideas and details, and talking about examples of each from the text.

Feel free to check in with your child during their nightly reading, and see if they can give you an example of a main idea from their reading.  Then ask them if they can give you an example of a specific detail from their reading.   Don't fret if it confuses them.  This is a skill we will practice all year.

On Friday, I introduced a second Reading Task the students will practice this year - Character Analysis.

We titled this task "Character Study" in our notebooks.  In order to prepare for our reading, we took a moment to do a sketch of the main character.

Our purpose for reading today was to get to know our main character better.  As a result, we were preparing to pay close attention to our character's thoughts, words, feelings, and actions, in order to understand them better.  We drew thought bubbles, speech bubbles, and so on, so we had a place to record our evidence of his character.  

                                    

We got as far as locating examples of his thoughts, and actions, that begin to show us what he is like. We will finish reading Chapter 2 on Wednesday, and then practice showing what we learned about our main character as we write our first one paragraph Character Essay.

A note about Reader's Workshop Volunteers: I will be using this first novel to teach the expectations and reading tasks I want students to be practicing this year.  Once we complete it, students will be placed in groups or partnerships that will best suit their individual reading goals.  At that time, I will welcome volunteers into the classroom to read with students, and support the completion of various reading comprehension tasks.  

Thanks for your patience!

WRITING

This week in Writer's Workshop we began switching gears from informational writing to writing for entertainment.  

After practicing the writing process as they wrote an informational paragraph about their summer, they are now being asked to once again, write about their summer, but this time with the purpose of entertainment.  

This second writing assignment will reinforce the clear difference between these two important writing modes, even though they revolve around the same topic - their summer.

In order to gear up for writing for entertainment, we had to turn our focus towards word choice.

                                    

In order for students to learn to master the art of word choice in their writing, they must first master the recognition of parts of speech.

To assess where students were at with knowing the basic parts of speech, we completed a simple exercise of identifying nouns, verbs, and adjectives, from illustrations from a picture book.

On Tuesday, I showed the class the story "Tuesday".  The story has no words, but tells an entertaining story through imagery.  

The students were asked to come up with the words that the pictures whimsically portrayed.

The next day we did a similar activity with the an illustration from the book 

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

This time we focused on identifying the various adverbs that were being pictured.  This was a little tricky at first, until we learned that an adverb just describes how the action is being done.  Once we focused on the finding the verbs (actions) in the picture, we could ask what word describes how the action is happening.  

                    sadly looking

               quickly catching

               happily greeting

We eventually came to the conclusion that many adverbs end in -ly endings.  

The students then spent some time this week typing up with Summer paragraphs, or their Alexander Essays from last week.  

This week we will finish up our focus on word choice as we learn how position words (prepositions) can add descriptiveness to our writing. 

MATH

Our week began with an algebraic thinking task with tile growing patterns.

First, I asked the students the above question.

After some discussion of various ways to predict the 10th arrangement -- build, draw, adding up in our head-- I introduced the table as yet another tool for organizing information; this time not data, but a mathematical pattern.  

This is the foundation of algebraic thinking--mathematical relationships, numerical patterns that lead to an unknown value, and the table is a crucial tool for ensuring success.  

The students then worked out patterns of their own in their journals. 

We spent the next couple of days visiting our various Unit 1 Workplaces aimed at building greater fluency with Addition and Subtraction.

On Thursday we completed our Unit 1 Graphing Assessment.  I will be share the results of this assessment with you at parent conferences. 

On Friday, students learned how to log into IXL.com to complete some math practice on-line.  I will be sending information home soon, regarding this opportunity for additional math practice.

SCIENCE

In science, this week’s forestry question revolved around “what happens when a tree is cut down?”  The students and I explored this concept as we completed a before and after illustration of a tree and it’s root system. 

                                 

This question of "what happens when a tree is cut down?" lent itself perfectly to the analysis and 
understanding of cause and effect relationships.  
Cause and effect is a comprehension skill that shows up in our literacy curriculum throughout the year, but I found this science content provided a great opportunity for this type of practice. 


The students worked in pairs to match causes to their corresponding effects.   

 They were expected to read the sentence fragments, matching up each cause (green) with it’s appropriate effect (pink).  Once they found the matches I would verify that they were correct before they could glue the sentences back together on a piece of paper.  

ART

On Friday, each student chose a native Oregon Forest Animal for the subject matter of their next art project.   After choosing their animal, they traced it onto black paper from a projection on the wall. 

We will cut out the silhouette of our animal and 

then use the image in next week's art project.  

Stay tuned!

IMPORTANT DATES

October 14  -  NO SCHOOL – Teacher In-service

October 18  - Field Trip to Hoyt Arboretum