What's Happening in Room 127? (February)

 February in Review

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

 

Reading:  We started a new unit called Character Studies.  With this unit we are working on diving deeper into our reading to look at the characters and use evidence to support our ideas and theories that we have about them.  We also are going to be looking at the structure of a story and how a character can go up and down a story mountain.  We are reading aloud the novel Because of Winn-Dixie and are using the main character of Opal to practice this work.  

 

Writing:  In Writing we have completed the literary essay unit.   When writing a literary essay the children need to name the story they are writing about, state their opinion or thesis, give evidence from the story by using exact quotes or summarizing parts of the story, use transitional phrases to lead into the evidence, and explain why their evidence matters.  We have been continuing to write written responses to prepare for IAR testing that March 11th.  Written responses for IAR are very similar to literary essays.  The main difference is that the kids have to answer a specific question with multiple parts rather than just supporting their own opinion.  We have been working on writing checklists before we write our response to help make sure that we have all of the parts of the question included in our writing.

 

Math:  We completed a unit on area. In this unit we explored the attributes of squares, rectangles, and trapezoids, tiled rectangles and squares to related the side lengths to area, used multiplication to find the area of rectangles, decomposed to find the total area of a rectangle, and found the area of composite figures. We are now just beginning fractions. Within this unit we will be working on partitioning a whole into equal parts, taking unit fractions and understanding their relationship to the whole, identifying fractions on a number line, finding equivalent fractions, and comparing fractions.

 

Social Studies:  Our current unit is about economics. The focus is for the students to understand what a free market economy is, supply and demand, how and why people save money, and global trade. We played some fun games during this unit to help the students understand the concept of supply and demand and global trade!

 

Coming Up

Some of the things that we will be working on in March are:

Writing: When IAR testing is completed we will begin an opinion writing unit.

Science:  We will be starting a new unit about weather.  In the first half of the unit we will focus on the three components of weather:  temperature, wind, and precipitation. 

 

Health:  “Let's Eat!" is the title of our next health unit.

Dates to Remember:
March 8 - Records/Planning Day--No School

March 8 - Trimester 2 Ends

March 11-15 - IAR Testing

March 25-April 1- Spring Break