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 are working on a unit called Character Studies.  With this unit we are 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 looking at the structure of a story and how a character can go up and down a story mountain, looking at the challenges our characters face and how they react to those challenges, and the roles that secondary characters play in stories. We read the novel Because of Winn-Dixie and used the main character of Opal to practice this work and are now reading Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel. We are 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 continued to write literary essays.   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.  

 

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:  We just finished a unit on economics. The focus was 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:

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 24-28- Spring Break