Week of March 9, 2015

   This will be another exciting week for you children. I hope you enjoyed learning about the person your child is researching for our Biography project. They are very excited and motivated! Joe Bruchac (http://josephbruchac.com/) is visiting Elsmere on Wednesday. We will hear him speak in the morning.

Reader's Workshop
    We will continue to read our biographies and use post-it notes to help us mark important events and dates in our person's life. We will organize our notes and make an outline of our first person narratives.
    This week we will finish our review of narrative texts and begin to review expository texts.

Writer's Workshop
    Our focus this week will continue to work on using a box and bullet structure to write essays. Our work this week will be more independent. The students will be required to write two on-demand essays during our state testing. This work will help them approach this task with more confidence.

Math
    Our fraction work continues this week. We will begin to look at fractions and length. We will also use fraction models to compare fractions with the same denominator and then compare fractions with the same numerator.
    We are also working on a data unit. We learned about tally charts, frequency tables and line plots last week. This week we will work with pictographs, and bar graphs.

Science
    We are working on using all of our wonderful research to create a project on the Solar System. The students are writing about each planet as a tourist destination. Our final projects will be displayed during the Biography Wax Museum.

   We have had some discussion in our room about the upcoming NY state ELA and Math tests. These tests are each three days long for a period of 70 mins each day. Our children are not used to sitting for a test of this length. We are working on learning about the structure of these tests and strategies to help them answer some of the questions they might encounter. We are also working on building our stamina by reading in class for an extended period of time.

Thanks to Mrs. Losee for being our Mystery Reader last week.

A dance break...