Saturday, December 16th- Breakfast with Santa at Long 8:30-11
Wednesday, December 20th- Class Holiday Party 2:00-3:00
Thursday, December 21st- January 3rd- NO SCHOOL
Thursday, January 4th- Return to school
Writing: We finished up our informational pieces on a Native American topic last week. The students have begun their second informational piece. They chose a science related topic, and most students are writing about animals. A few are writing about space. We will finish up these pieces before the end of the quarter.
Reading: We are exploring informational texts and discussing how to find the main idea. We talk about how informational books often have more than one main idea since they are so full of information. In book clubs, we will be reading shorter informational texts until winter break. Then, we will start new fiction books when we return.
Math: In math, we have been learning to write expressions and apply the order of operations. Soon, we will be starting fractions. With their math partners, the students have been doing activities to spiral review what we have learned so far this year as well as doing a variety of problem solving projects.
Science: We have wrapped up our unit on water and the water cycle. We have been doing a lot of hands on activities about water! In one activity, students used estimation and graphing to discover the surprising differences in the amounts of fresh and salt water on Earth. Below is the bar graph we made comparing the amount of salt water, fresh water, and frozen fresh water on Earth. The kids couldn't believe that liquid fresh water was such a small percentage! You can barely see it on the graph.
My favorite activity was when the students had to construct an explanation about a surprising occurrence: the existence of underground water. They played a game in which they had to obtain and combine information about groundwater in order to selected the best site to build a town for them to live in. In the end, they found out if they would survive or not in the place they selected.
This past week the students explored the effects of natural hazards such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and dust storms. They built a small model house and roof and had to design multiple solutions to keep the house from blowing away in a windstorm. They had to evaluate their choices and decide which was the worked the best at keeping the house in place. They had some creative ideas!
Social Studies: Ms. Scalise has been teaching about the Bill of Rights and the three branches of government.
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