Thank you for staying on top of things and making sure that your child's homework is returned to their teacher by the due date and that their take-home book is returned daily. Remember that spelling homework is every other week and the word practice that your child has done daily needs to be shown to Mrs. Langham either by a written note of activities or the actual spelling practice activities. Please make sure your child is following directions on the reading response sheets and doing the required amount of writing and illustrating and that they are on topic. Some students are still summarizing books, which is not the skill listed. I expect them to have a thoughtful reflection, especially since they have an entire week to complete this activity. Feel free to add more paper if your child needs more room for their response. Mrs. Langham sends homework home every Monday and it is due on Friday.
Mrs. Hobbs will always give students two days to complete assignments. She will also put her name by the due date so you know it is from her.
Here is Mrs. Hobbs' class working on their Pop Rock writing and craft activity. They had a blast making these. What a fun project!
This week in language arts, we really focused on noticing how stories are organized. Our main book was The Red-Eyed Tree Frog. We looked at this informational book several times this week.
The organization trait teaches us to have bold beginnings, mighty middles and excellent endings.
In the above book, we paid special attention to how the book started "Evening comes to the rain forest". Normally books don't start at night, but we learned that the red-eyed tree frog is nocturnal and it makes perfect sense to start the story this way as he is just waking. We learned that if we include a setting and a time in our beginning we can really change it up. We practiced mixing up the setting and time in our worksheet. This helps to get the reader's attention right away and is one way to start an introduction.
We want to grab the reader's attention right away with our bold beginnings and hook them in so they will want to keep reading. Here are some characteristics of bold beginnings.
The next day, we discussed building a mighty middle. The middle of the story is where most of the meat of the story, or the details, take place. We worked with our elbow partners and added more details to The Red-Eyed Tree Frog and wrote more sentences that could be included in the story or other possible activities and outcomes for the frog. Some of the details were quite humorous, including eating an iguana and getting as big as a dinosaur. We liked sharing our stories with the class.
When working on mighty middles, these are the characteristics we are looking for.
We then worked on excellent endings. We sequenced the beginning, middle and end of The Red-Eyed Tree Frog.
Here are the characteristics of an excellent ending.
We read several books and looked for all of these organizational traits within the books. Here are some of the books we enjoyed. We also discussed the author's purpose (to inform or entertain). We paid special attention to the illustrations in the story and how they can also move the story along.
This is a song that helped remind us of the organization trait.
After comparing all of these books and looking at the way they were organized throughout the week, we wrote our own stories. We will continue working on the organization trait next week. These are the traits we are looking for in our writing.
Skippy the Frog was introduced as a reading strategy last week. He teaches us to skip the word, read to the end and then hop back to the beginning of the sentence and reread.
Tryin' Lion teaches us to put a word in that makes sense. We combined these two reading strategies and played more Guess the Covered Word games. They love this one. We learned that we also need to look at the first letter to see if our guess is correct.
Many students are reversing b and d. Mrs. Langham taught us a strategy to help remind us which is which using a picture of a bed and our two hands with a thumbs up.
You can make a bed with your hands. The left hand makes a lower case b with the fist part making the round part of the bed and the right hand makes the d with the fist making the round part of the d. Encourage your child to use this strategy when trying to remember which letter to write.
Mrs. Phillips came and talked to our classes about bullying and what to do when you encounter a bully. We practiced role-playing different scenarios to help us.
Our Traveling Tuesday Science talked about the different states of matter.
We watched a solid change to a liquid and then to a gas and discussed the water cycle and how condensation forms and can change the gas back to a liquid.
Traveling Tuesday is all about Science! In Mrs. Clark's rotation we played a game where we tried different ways to melt an ice cube. We found out that heat can change matter. Mrs. Hobbs had three classes of amazing container designers. Their mission: create a container that can insulate an ice cube and keep it from melting. Check them out.
This week we also completed sorting activities - hot/cold and states of matter.
We read books that focused on Brrrrr ... cold things.
One of our experiments is still in the deep freeze. We put a balloon filled with gas and a balloon filled with liquid in the freezer. We are wondering how they will change when we take them out.
We also read a book about the inventor of Gatorade. Dr. Cade was born in San Antonio and graduated from UT. We found out that he was a scientist who saw a problem and persisted in finding a solution.
When the weather outside is rainy, we are inside participating in Adventure to Fitness. This is an on-line 30 minute keep your body moving activity.
In Mathematics, we started a new unit of study... Geometry! We will be studying plane (2 dimensional) figures. We came up with some noticings about the shapes.
Ms. Rosso came by to help us play a Math Pentathlon game.
Of course, we read some good books about geometric figures.
We also completed a sort about size/shape.
We started a new focus in Social Studies. We finished this sentence stem - "Maps are important because ..." and then watched a video on maps.
Did you hear the exciting news? Mrs. Hobbs' class received a Dillo Best award for our study of matter! We are so proud. Thanks to Mrs. Langham's homeroom for their kind words.
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