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...

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.