Students will bring home a note regarding Valentine's Day on Monday (I had it ready to go Friday, but forgot to send it--sorry!). It's another busy week at school for us:
Math- We begin Unit 7 this week- fractions! We have lots of fun activities planned for the students this week with fractions. The activities will help them review the part/whole relationship, uses of fractions, and fractions on a number line. They will also be learning how to find fractional parts of a set and fractional parts of polygonal regions. On Valentine’s Day the students will do several activities using candy hearts- measuring and graphing, classifying, comparing, and estimating.
Reading- Our focus this week is on author’s purpose. What is the author’s purpose for writing any given passage? It’s usually one of three purposes- Persuade, Inform, Entertain (PIE). Students will read several short paragraphs and determine what the author’s purpose was. Students will also use magazines and newspapers to find everyday examples of persuasion, information, and entertainment in regards to author’s purpose. They will also participate in a fun activity later in the week where they are given a specific item and will draw a strip out of a bag that says Persuade or Inform or Entertain. They must write something to go with it depending on what their strip says. So if they are given a small bag of candy and they choose the persuasion strip, they have to persuade their audience to want to eat that candy, etc.
Writing- Our focus is just to write, write, write. We are really working on spending as much time as we can conferencing with the students so we can help each one grow as a writer. We are focusing on both types of writing (narrative and expository). We are really just trying to look at what we can do to help students feel prepared for the STAAR. We are spending time working on the form and structure of their writing as well. Our grammar focus is conjunctions or adverbs (depending on the class).
Social Studies- This week there will be a chapter 6 vocabulary test and a chapter 6 cumulative test.
Science- We continue exploring and learning in our Going Green planner. This week our focus is recycling. We will discuss different ways to reduce the trash we make (compost, reuse, recycle). We will also discuss the benefits of recycling and its role in conservation.
