Friday Evening Post (Sept 28, 2018)

Reader’s Workshop

For reader’s workshop we’ve been practicing using precise words, comparisons, and explanations to describe our thoughts about the characters in our book! We’re also practicing revising our ideas on characters, when new important details from the book are put into light!

We're also realizing that characters in our stories are complicated and complex! Characters may act one way in one setting in one relationship, and another way in a different context. Or they may be one way on the outside and another way on the inside! Good readers look for text evidence that shows this complexity to form solid ideas about characters!

Math

This week we’ve been using the array model to reinforce the relationship between pairs of tens and fives facts. We recognized that the product of a tens fact can be halved to figure out the product of a fives fact. We then extend the use-tens strategy to multiply two-digit factors by five (for example, 28 × 5).

We’re also working with arrays to build down from a known tens fact to multiply by nine. You’ll notice that we’ve been using tens facts as a basis to get to the solution of other facts. That’s because tens facts are efficient to multiply with and therefore a good place to start!

We then extend the build-down strategy, a.k.a the nearest tens strategy (used previously to multiply by nine) to help multiply a two-digit factor by nine (for example, 9 × 17). The build-down strategy is then used to multiply a one-digit factor by another factor that is near a multiple of ten (for example, 39 × 3)

Writer’s Workshop

We’ve been enacting, which is to act a scene in our story arc as the character! So…we’re putting ourselves in the shoes of our characters, envisioning and enacting out the thoughts, feelings, dialogue, and actions of that character, and then writing down what we’ve been envisioning in our minds!

Envisioning helps with the revision of our writing too! We took some of our writing that was really only a summary, and decided to break it apart scene by scene in order to show thoughts, feelings, actions, and dialogue of characters in our story!

Social Studies

This week we’ve been practicing Investigative/Inquiry skills to find out more about Native Americans groups that called California their home!

Science Lab 

We discussed the topic of ecosystems and how living and non-living things in an ecosystem rely on one another!

 And that's a wrap folks! Cheers, and have a good one!

Friday Afternoon Post (Septemebr 21, 2018)

Writer’s Workshop

This week for writer’s Workshop, We’ve been practicing drafting story arcs that intensify the problem/challenge of the story! We spent time planning how the plot of our story will go, making sure there is an arc to the story, trying again and again until the plan feel just right!

After planning our story arc, we begin to draft the story scene by scene, only using summary when needed! How do we draft each scene? By envisioning the scene as though it were a scene from a movie! We took our first few scenes and drafted a strong lead that shows what was happening and where, in order to get readers into the world of the story!

As we were envisioning our scenes to write out, we added more to the plot of the story, by including not only character actions and dialogue, but also character thoughts and feelings!

Reader’s Workshop

This week for Reader’s Workshop, we’ve been practicing noting important details in the stories that we read, and then forming ideas based on these details! The desires of characters and how they are achieved are some story details that we’re noting!

We’re also noticing repeated details of characters’—traits, features, objects—anything about the character that the author repeats…and we ask ourselves…why?

Math

This week, we’ve been practicing how to collaborate when dealing with math word problems, as well as practicing using base-10 and decomposing blocks to double and halve three-digit multiples of ten!

And that's a wrap folks! Cheers, and have an awesome weekend!