What's Happening in Room 127? (April/May)

 April in Review

April was a very busy month including a field trip, IAR, and MAP testing!  Here are some things we worked on in this month and will be covering in May:

Reading:  We finished our Character Studies unit.  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 completed a culminating project for the book that they read.  They worked as a club to create a poster that showed a story mountain for the book, identified 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 were then able to creatively display all of this information in their poster.

We have begun our fifth and final unit of the year which is research clubs.  We are revisiting nonfiction reading and learning how to research a topic using a variety of sources.  Each research club is working on researching a different animal.  For each animal they identified an easy overview book.  After reading this book they identified four subtopics that they are now learning more about.  Students are now practicing their main idea and summarizing skills by creating a boxes and bullets for each subtopic from the easy overview book.  Then they are synthesizing information, by reading other books about their animals and learning new information on each subtopic. 

Writing:  We are working on our final unit which is adapting fairy tales.  With this unit we are revisiting narrative writing, which is how we started the year.  The students all chose from four different fairy tales to adapt.  When adapting a fairy tale they are working on making a change to improve the story.  This change will then lead to other changes.  They then need to make a character with traits and wants who runs into trouble and tell their story in two or three scenes.  As we did earlier this year we are working on showing, not telling, when writing these stories.  The students also need to be including dialogue.  

Math:  We wrapped up our fractions unit by using one or two number lines to find pairs of equivalent fractions and comparing fractions greater than 1.  We also worked on identifying fractions equivalent to whole numbers and writing whole numbers as fractions with a denominator of 1. 

Our last module focuses on a variety of topics.  We will be working on time, graphing, attributes of two-dimensional figures, and perimeter.  

Science:  Since returning from Spring Break we have been learning how weather is predicted, how weather and climate are related, and different types of extreme weather.  The students completed a small project where they researched one specific climate zone and used different tools on Google Slides to share the information.  Their project was printed out and is on display in our classroom.  They will bring it home in a few weeks.  We will also got our caterpillars, which are now in the chrysalis stage of their life cycle.  We have had a lot of fun watching them grow!

Social Studies:  Our last social studies unit is on civics.  In this unit we are learning about different levels of government, services that our government provides to us, and how citizens can participate in government.  At the end of this unit the class will be completing a project where they will have the choice of showing what they learned about government or choosing an issue that they feel strongly about in their community and what they can do to help solve this problem.

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

Reading:  see above 

Writing:  see above

Math:  see above

Health:  We will be learning about the skeletal system in "Finding Out About Bones".  

Dates to Remember:
May 20 - Field Day (I don't know the time yet.)

May 26 - No School