Read Across America

     This is going to be a spectacular month! We begin March with Read Across America Day on Monday. The students should wear any clothing with words. Also, I encourage the students to bring in any books they are interested in reading in class this week. We will be doing a wide variety of reading all week.
   
 Reader's Workshop
    This week we will begin reading our biographies. We will begin by exploring the structure of a biography and the particular series we will be using. Then students will dive right in to reading their own biography. We will read carefully and use post-its to mark important events and dates in our person's life.
    We will also have a short review unit this week on narrative. We will review what a narrative text structure looks like and revisit our work on characters from the beginning of the year.

Writer's Workshop
   We are almost finished with our informational writing. We will be editing and revising our work together in anticipation of publishing.
   This week we will also begin to explore essays as a writing topic. We will focus on using the box and bullet structure to organize our essay writing. We will write essays as a whole class, in partnerships and independently. All of our essay writing will be in response to short texts.

Math
   We are working on fractions again this week. This week's focus will be on using fractions to represent parts of a set and putting fractions on a number line. This work can be tricky for students, if you have any opportunities to talk about or show fractions at home that would be helpful. Cooking or baking lend themselves to fraction discussions.
    This week we will also finish our volume unit and move on to a data unit. This will include line plots, bar graphs, and pictographs.

Science
    We are finished with our Solar System research. We unsuccessfully tried to use the glogster website last week, and at this point I feel that we can no longer spend time trying to use this piece of technology. We will still do a project with our research but it will be a paper and pencil project.