What's Happening in Room 127? (November)

 November in Review

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

English/Language Arts (ELA):  This month we completed our ELA unit on poetry.  During this unit we read a variety of rhyming, free verse, and haiku poems.  The students used textual evidence to analyze poetry.  We also learned about different poetry elements such as similes, metaphors, rhyming patterns, alliterations, hyperboles, onomatopoeia, and repetition.  Each child wrote two original poems where they needed to include at least two of these poetry elements in their poem.  To culminate the unit we had a poetry walk.  The poems that everyone wrote were posted around the room.  The kids had the opportunity to read each other's poems and write a compliment for them.

Math:  We continued the second module "Place Value Concepts Through Metric Measurement".  We spent most of the month working with different strategies to add and subtract larger numbers.  Some of the strategies we used are breaking apart numbers and adding/subtracting like units.  We also practiced making the next ten/hundred and using compensation. There are different ways you can manipulate numbers to do these operations, along with the standard vertical form.  The idea is that students will be more comfortable in working with numbers and be able to choose a strategy that they feel comfortable with using.

Social Studies:  We have started our second social studies unit "History".  So far we learned about why people come to settle in the United States from other countries.  We are now learning about how all of our cultures are unique.  We are learning about different languages, holidays, traditions, and foods that communities share.  We will continue with this when we return from break.

Second Step:  We continued talking about emotions.  We talked about different words to describe anger, happiness, and the benefits of taking a break.

Health:  In health we continued to talk about healthy/unhealthy friendships along with healthy/unhealthy influences.  The purpose of these lessons were to:

• to distinguish between healthy and harmful influences on health, explaining why it is important to seeking trustworthy assistance when making health decisions
• describe ways to assertively respond when others try to influence them to participate in dangerous activities.

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

ELA:  We have just begun a unit on ancient Rome.

Math:  In module 3 we will be going back to multiplication and division.  We will be focusing on the facts for 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Dates to Remember:

Dec. 8 - MAP testing this week (specific days to come later)

Dec. 18 - Holiday Sing 

Dec. 20-Jan. 4 - Winter Break