What's Happening in Room 127? (March)

 March in Review

Here are some things we worked on in March:

Reading:  We continued working on our Character Studies unit and preparing to take the IAR assessments.  The students all participated in a book club and applied our work with theories, theme, and story elements while they were reading these books.  The students will be completing a culminating project for the book that they read.  They will work as a club to create a poster that shows a story mountain for the book, identifies the main character and traits for this character, secondary characters and their roles in the story, the problem/solution, and the theme of the book.  They will then creatively display all of this information in their poster.  We will be wrapping up this unit in the next couple of weeks.

Writing:  We worked on writing written responses to prepare for IAR testing.  Written responses for IAR are very similar to the literary essays that we have been writing.  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 are continuing to work with fractions.  Students used tape diagrams to help compare fractions.  The tape diagrams help with reasoning to see how the size of the parts are different.  We also focused on fractions on a number line.  Students 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.  Not only do students need to identify where fractions are located on a number line, but they also need to create and partition the number lines independently.

Science:  We have been having a lot of fun learning about weather!  In the first half of the unit we focused on the three components of weather:  temperature, wind, and precipitation.  Coming up 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:

Reading:  We will be moving back into focusing on nonfiction texts.

Writing:  We will be starting a unit on adapting fairy tales.

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

April 1 - April 8 - IAR Testing

April 18 - No School

April 29 - Field Trip (information to come home on 3/31)