Week 5 - October

Last week we looked closely at food labels to determine whether or not they were a nutritious food filled with vitamins and minerals. The students' bright minds were able to determine what foods were more nutritious and were surprised to find out that a bottle of naked juice has more grams of sugar than a coke, even though the label says "no added sugar". On Friday we had Ms. E, the district's nutrition and wellness specialist, come to visit our classroom and inform us how they create the breakfast and lunch menu. She also shared that most of our food is made from scratch and comes from local farms. The students were eager to go to lunch and make their trays more colorful.  

In math we have been plugging away with Unit 2, which focuses on addition, subtraction and multiplication of whole numbers and decimals. We welcomed a handful of students from Mr. Davis' class and worked hard on our math journal pages, games and group activities. The students are working on memorizing their math facts by playing Shake, Rattle and Roll along with Safety Zone. We will be testing Unit 2 before MEA break and moving on to Unit 3, Geometry. It's hard to believe that we are almost done with our second unit already.

Our reading class jumped right in and started our first set of novels. The students were able to chose between Wringer, The Boy Who Saved Baseball, Replay and Pictures of Hollis Woods. The students are learning to manage their time and complete their reading assignments so they are ready for their group discussions. Our focus right now is on the exposition in each story where the author introduces us to the characters and their back stories along with the setting. We are also using our read aloud book, The City of Ember, to learn about exposition. 

We are now moving on to annotating a piece of text using specific symbols to help us think critically while reading. The students read an article about a student at the head of her class that was homeless and another article about Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban for being a girl and going to school. These articles came from a wonderful online resource called Common Lit.

Last week we started our first science unit, Environments, and the students got their hands dirty by planting terrariums filled with corn, pea, radish, clover and corn seeds. I can't believe that I didn't take any pictures of the students planting, this week they will plant once again to see how water affects the growth of seeds.