LANGUAGE ARTS: We shared our all-time favorite books. Now we have a wall-full of suggestions from peers to help us pick out the next book to read. The first reading strategy will be connections: linking what we read with ourselves, our world, and other books.
WRITING: The focus for the beginning of our writing work will be exploring mentor texts for writing crafts. The first craft will be “color words.” As the name suggests, color words enhance the hues, tonalities, and visual details of our writing.
MATH: Mathematical understanding, or numeration, is the key to success in algebra, geometry, and computation. For this reason, we’ll be spending the week making sure each student knows the why behind the computational strategies they use. Concepts include positional power (place value), mathematical properties (commutative, associative, distributive, identity, zero), positive and negative integers, and how these apply to their mathematical world.
THEME: Geology is our focus and “change” our theme as we explore the forces that shape, mold, and move the earth. The movement of tectonic plates during earthquakes was modeled on Friday using graham crackers and icing. It was messy but delicious!