What's Happening in Room 127? (March)

 March in Review

Here are some things we worked on in March:

Reading:  We spent time preparing for and taking the IAR assessments.  We also continued to work on our Character Studies unit.  We have been developing theories about our characters, working on the different elements of the plot of a story, looking at the challenges our characters face and how they react to those challenges, and the roles that secondary characters play in stories.  We have also been reading a second novel, Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel, and using this book to compare/contrast characters and themes to Because of Winn-Dixie.   The students have just started book clubs where they are reading a novel with a small group and working on practicing all of these skills.  

Writing:  In Writing we have just started an opinion writing unit.  Each child is working on a piece about something that they feel strongly about.  Each piece of writing must have a thesis that is "big and bold"!  They must have reasons and evidence to support their thesis, along with language to draw their audience into their writing, and transitions to help organize their writing.  We are building on many of the same skills that we worked on in the informational writing unit, but gearing it towards a different genre.

Math:  We are continuing our work with fractions.  We focused on unit fractions and their relationship to the whole.  They composed and decomposed wholes with unit and non-unit fractions by using number bonds and tape diagrams.  Students used tape diagrams to help compare fractions.  The tape diagrams help them with their reasoning to see how the size of the parts are different.  After the break we will be focusing on fractions on a number line.  Students will relate a fraction's value to its size, its location on a number line, and its distance from 0 to find pairs of equivalent fractions.

Science:  We have been having a lot of fun learning about weather!  In the first half of the unit we are focusing on the three components of weather:  temperature, wind, and precipitation.  After Spring Break we will be learning about how weather is predicted, how weather and climate are related, and different types of extreme weather.

Coming Up

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

Health:  We will be continuing "Let's Eat!" for a little bit longer.  Our unit after that is titled "The Better to See You With".

Dates to Remember

March 25-April 1 - Spring Break

April 8 - Solar Eclipse (permission slips due 3/22)

April 23 - Field Trip