Good Afternoon Weckie Families!
Happy Friday! What a week it has been... School-wide we kicked off March is Reading month with a building book competition, our annual "Battle of the Books" competition where we work as a classroom, than grade level and then entire school to pick our top favorite picture book for our building. We had a BLAST at the Outdoor Education Center on Thursday this week and then we wrapped up the week today with a building-wide "Fox in Sock - Crazy Socks Day" at Dublin!
Please make sure you are following our class Twitter @WeAreTheWeckies for photos from our special day at the OEC!
Readers' Workshop
In Readers' Workshop we are wrapping up our non-fiction unit. We have been immersed in non-fiction books the last couple of weeks! We have compared two non-fiction books on the same topic to each other to find similarities and differences in information, we have looked for clues to solve tricky new vocabulary words that may emerge in non-fiction books and we have spent time practicing reading with fluency like experts on a topic would do!
Writers' Workshop
Our experts are well on their way in writing expert books! We have spent the last month working on expert topic books where each child has been writing multiple books on topics that they consider themselves an expert on. Topics I have learned about in writing conferences have included: cooking, gymnastics, cheerleading, snowboarding, baking brownies, cheetahs, how to somersault, how to go camping, how to care for a pet turtle, a video game laboratory guide, cats, worms, wolves, plants, gaming systems, dinosaurs and I'm probably missing a few more topics! We have SO many great experts in our classroom!
Math Workshop
Before break we completed our Unit 5 diagnostic. Much of unit 5 in math was spent solving number stories and using different diagrams to help us prove our answers. The unit 5 tests will be coming home soon! Unit 6 opens up with a fun data day activity we did where we counted the number of pockets everyone was wearing, and created: a tally chart, a pictograph and a bar graph of our data. We then used our bodies to create a graph and found the median value (2 pockets). The remainder of our unit 6 work this week has focused more on number stories and using diagrams for subtraction to help us organize numbers and find the difference between two values.
Science
We are well on our way into our Air and Weather unit for Science! We had a blast exploring air the last two weeks with parachutes and with syringes and tubes! We found that while we cannot see air, the shape of an object can change when filled with air, we can feel air and sometimes we can even hear the movement of air as it hits objects! More to come for our curious scientists...
Important Dates Ahead...
Thursday, March 10th - 1/2 Day of School (Afternoon PD for teachers)
Friday, March 11th - Spring Picture Day
Wednesday, March 16th - Book Fair Family Night (times coming soon)
Thursday, March 17th- Wear Green for St. Patrick's Day/Dublin Spirit Wear Day
Thursday, March 24th - Special Class Lunch (more details to come soon)
Friday, March 25th- Read-In Pajama Day at Dublin (more details to come soon)
