Saturday, December 13, 2014

Classroom Update: December 8-12

I can’t believe that we only have 5 days until Winter Break! The first half of the year has flown by! This coming week will be jam packed with lots of fun activities to help wrap up our 2nd 9 weeks of school. If you haven’t already done so, please send in your assigned party item by Monday. We are looking forward to a great Holiday Party on Friday at 1:00. Thank you to Mrs. Bivek and Mrs. Hummel for helping organize it.  
The last few weeks we have been working on two step words problems and 2 and 3 dimensional shapes in math.  Students are continuing to impress me with how well they can implement the strategies taught when solving word problems. The biggest mistake I am seeing is the actual computation part. They are making careless errors when adding or subtracting. To help build fluency with their math facts we have started math minute. Students complete these twice a week. They are given 25 problems to solve in 2 minutes. If they solve all 25 in 2 minutes they can move to the next level. Students are also graphing their progress in the Leadership Notebooks.  This past week we really focused on 2 and 3 dimensional shapes. They are responsible for describing shapes according to their attributes like sides, angles, vertices, edges, and faces. We learned about quadrilaterals and how to sort shapes by their sides and angles. Next week students will complete a variety of shape centers to review concepts taught.
In social studies, we have been learning about three different historical figures. James Oglethorpe, Mary Musgrove, and Tomochichi. Students have read weekly readers, biographies, and watched pebble go clips on them. They recorded facts on an organizer and then created a portrait with facts. This week students will choose one historical figure to write an informational summary on. When we return from the break we will begin our unit on Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson.
In language arts and writing we have been focusing on non-fiction text features and informational writing. Students just completed a non-fiction text feature in class project. They identified the features in an informational book and used them to complete the project. We have also been learning about adverbs and how they can help us in our writing. This week students will create a gingerbread man. They will use adjectives and adverbs to describe their gingerbread person.
We have also been reading a variety of gingerbread stories during our literacy time. Students are asking and answering questions such as who are the characters, what is the problem, where and when does the story take place, and how was the problem solved on a story chart. We will continue reading stories this week and completing some other gingerbread activities.

Important Dates and Reminders:
Monday, December 15th- party item due
Friday, December 19th- Holiday Party (1:00pm)
Winter Break- December 22nd- January 5th