Week In Review

Once again, it was a very busy week in Room 29!  I hope you all had a chance to check out the kids' great character trait projects that I posted last week.  You can also find them and other pictures on my Edline site under the Room 29 at work and play link in the right hand sidebar.

Unfortunately, I was out sick with strep throat for a couple of day, but I left the substitute plenty of work for everyone to do, so it was pretty much business as usual.

On Monday, we served at the lab classroom for a Writer's Workshop lesson by Gary Peterson, a consultant from Teacher's College/Columbia University in NYC.  He worked with our students on everything from making good transitions in their writing to elaborating and expanding on their ideas. He was very impressed with their writing!  We really have come so far as storytellers in these past 7 weeks or so.

During the rest of the week, students worked on finishing up their final narratives; we will be moving on to informational writing next week.

In Reader's Workshop, we are also wrapping up our unit on character change and character traits.  We read Dancing In the Wings, The Paperbag Princess, and The Honest to Goodness Truth and wrote about all three of the stories.

Students also read independently and wrote me letters about their thinking about their reading and worked hard in their reading groups to improve fluency and comprehension (both orally and in writing).

After a long 7 weeks or so, we finally finished up our first module in math and took the end of module assessment.  I have these tests in your children's folders, which I will share at conferences, but if you are curious about how your child did, please let me know and I can give you their grade.  This was a tough test, but everyone has come a long way in their understanding of the principles of multiplication and division.  Next week we move on to concepts in time and measurement--I have some really fun math games designed to fit in nicely with this unit.  I think your kids are going to love them.

In science, we broke open a rock (after I bashed it with a hammer about 100 times) and saw the geode inside.  I gave everyone a small piece to take home.  We will be concluding our unit on rocks and minerals later next week.

The students continue to learn more about our state of Connecticut in social studies.  We also talked about Christopher Columbus (both positive and negative aspects of his campaign to the Americas).  We will continue this discussion/debate next week.

Lastly, we began reading my favorite book of all time, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.  As with The Witches, I would ask that you not read this to your child at home while we are reading it at school; we will be doing some predicting and a lot of discussion about the book, and I don't want anyone to get ahead and miss out on the daily suspense of hearing it read every day.  I would, however, encourage you parents to read the book yourselves.  I think you will fall in love with it as much I have.  It is a breathtakingly beautiful story.  Don't forget to keep the tissues nearby, though.

Hope you all have a fun long weekend!