What's Happening in Room 127? (December)

 December in Review

Here are some of the things we've been working on this month:

Reading:  We wrapped up our nonfiction unit and have just started a mystery unit, which the students and I are all really enjoying!  With this unit we are learning about the mystery genre and how mystery books tend to go.  We also are working on making our prediction and summarizing skills more secure.

Writing:  In Writing we have just finished publishing our informational books.  I'm so impressed by the knowledge that the students have about their topics!  They will be sharing these with you shortly. We also did some seasonal writing and work with nouns.  During our word study we continued to work with different vowel combinations and the different sounds that they make such as oo, ou, ui, and u.

Science:  We studied forces and motion.  During this unit we worked on identifying the position and motion of forces, balanced vs. unbalanced forces, we measured patterns of motion to make predictions of future motion, we learned about bar magnets and electromagnets, and we studied static electricity.  The students completed a STEM challenge where given only certain materials (magnet, paperclip tied to a string, masking tape, cups of different sizes, and popsicle sticks) they needed to design and build a structure that would allow a paperclip to float in the air, against the pull of gravity. They also created electromagnets.

Math:  In module 3 we are back to focusing on multiplication and division.  We are focusing on the facts for 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 and 1.  With this, we are working a lot on using the distributive property (or breaking apart method as we sometimes call it) to help break a harder multiplication problem into two simpler problems that are easier for us to solve.  This will be helpful for students when they face a problem that they don't know the answer to, instead of drawing arrays and equal groups.

Coming Up
Some of the things that we will be working on in January are:

Reading/Writing:  We will be continuing our mystery unit and will be starting a unit on literary essays.

Math:  We will be continuing with multiplication and division.

Health:  Our next unit is called, "Things You Might Catch".