Friday Afternoon Post (September 14, 2018)

Howdy Folks!

Hmmmm…let’s see what we’ve been working on this week!

In Reader’s Workshop, we’ve been practicing the skill of growing ideas about characters that we’re reading! That is, we’ve been stopping as we’re reading in order to notice any patterns in a character’s actions, and notice any new actions of said character that change those patterns. We then ask ourselves why might this character act like this? All of this is having us practice close-reading, summarizing/retelling, and making inferences using evidence from the text. Booyah!

Collaborating in order to make meaning of the text we're reading!

For Writer’s Workshop, we’ve been practicing developing scenes that display our character’s motivations and struggles! So, after forming the inner and outer traits of our character, we also listed possible desires and challenges these characters might have! We then develop and summarize a few scenes that display these desires and challenges, pick one of those scenes, envision the actions, words, thoughts of the character(s) in the scene as though it were a movie (in order to show, not tell), and then we write, write, write out that scene! Seems easy, but this process takes A LOT of practice!

Sharing our writing with one another!

For math this week, we’ve been practicing estimating by deciding how exact our estimation needs to be in relationship to the actual answer. We then utilize the structure of place value to perform these estimations by rounding to the tens, hundred, or thousands!! 

We’ve also been practicing the standard algorithm for addition, discussing what regrouping actually means, and checking for precision when employing the algorithm!

Along with the standard algorithm, we’ve been practicing decomposing numbers, as another method for addition. This requires us to, again, use the structure of place value, in order to break down numbers into more efficient parts to add!

We also had Science Lab this week, going over the scientific process with Mrs. Seachrist!

And we talked about mental health and how it ties in with social-emotional learning this week! 

We hung out with our kinder buddies too!

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

Friday Afternoon Post (Sept 7, 2018)

Howdy Folks!

What did we do this week? Well...

For Reader's Workshop we're working on the skill of envisioning, making mental movies as we read, and recording down what we're seeing in our heads! We're also in the business of "leveling up" the substance of our work, so that we can get better at our reading skills!

We also worked on our non-fiction reading skills! With support and collaboration, we determined the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details. We also referred to details and examples in a text when drawing inferences from the text. And to top it all off, we determined the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words or phrases in a text with our collaborators!

We extended Reader's Workshop into Writer's Workshop by focusing in on and explaining the traits of the characters in our story!

For math this week, we focused on reviewing multiplication strategies (doubles, understanding and utilizing the zero rule), and then applied these strategies on our math assessment!

And of course we had Pokemon Friday:

We also hung out with our kinder buddies, and helped them level up their writing skills!

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