Week 19 and a few more

Math

The students are learning about coordinate grids, translations and reflections.

We took a break during World Read Aloud day and read aloud the picture book, The Math Curse, to a class in Texas.

During our reading time on World Read Aloud Day the reading class read aloud 28 Days: Moments in Black History that Changed the World to a class in Illinois.

 Science
Learning about Pulley systems.

 Virtual Field Trip to the Grand Canyon with Shadow Armfield. The students were able to learn about the Grand Canyon's history, geography, plant and animal life while "standing" on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Shadow is a professor at Northern Arizona University who taught us while doing a Google Hangout. The students learned a ton and asked really great questions.

Just because we could...
We couldn't help but get outside to bask in the gorgeous and warm day on Friday. A little tag with a some multiplication thrown in.

We had the great opportunity to participate in another virtual field trip and learn about Mexico's culture and traditions from a 5th grade class in Mexico City. The students were able to vote on what they wanted to learn about using Kahoot and were able to ask questions and get them answered in real time on the spot using the chat feature and Twitter.

Reading & Writing

Writing Celebration - the students went into various 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th grade classrooms to share their personal narratives with the classes. You can check out your child's writing here at our class website.

The students are enjoying reading their feedback sheets from the students who shared a star (something they liked) and a wish (something they wished the author would have shared more of or something they wished the author would have expanded on). There was a buzz of excitement in the air after reading aloud their narratives and reading the feedback.

STARBASE MN

I'll LET THE PICTURES TELL THE STORY! 

Week 17

Math
We have been quickly moving through Unit 7 and will be testing on Tuesday just in time for STARBASE. The students have been learning about Order of Operations and creating their own acronym for Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. Check out this padlet to see what silly sayings they came up with. We now have a class blog and our homeroom students are working on creating their own order of operations problem to post and have others try and solve. All the posts aren't public yet but check back in a few days and see if you can solve their problems! We are ending this unit with adding and subtracting negative and positive numbers. Not an easy concept to grasp but we used some yellow and red chips to make this abstract concept concrete and boy did it help!

Here the students are testing their order of operations knowledge with the "We Got This" activity. This group is showing you how they celebrate when they all get the same correct answer.

 Other groups hard at work on PEMDAS

Science
We are moving on to the next simple machine, the pulley. The students spent one class time working with their new science partners to create a pulley system. They were able to create a single fixed and single movable pulley system. The next step was to measure the force, in Newtons, to see how much effort it would take to lift a load.

Social Studies
Climate, geography, land forms, water forms...we have been learning lots. The students have been following along with our presentations and answering questions using PearDeck, completing anticipation guides, reading the text and taking 3-column notes online and on paper to solidify their understanding of how geography does affect where we live.


Reading
Our survival novels are just about finished and the students have been enjoying their books, discussing with their classmates, completing online forms to show their understanding and blogging about the significant moments in their novels. Take a peek at our class blog and leave your child and their classmates some (QUALITY) comments:). We have a few classes following our blog and are looking forward to receiving feedback from students we haven't met yet.

Esperanza Rising book discussion

         Learning how to blog and write a quality post that others will want to read and respond to.

We have been learning about internal and external conflict and determining what conflicts appear in the novels we are reading and in some popular picture books. The students also created a blog post about conflict, check out the blog to read their posts and leave them a comment.

Writing

Mrs. Van Batavia continues to visit our class 2-3 times a week to guide the students through the narrative writing process.  The class is working on crafting a good lead that will hook their readers. The students analyzed other leads from published authors and discussed what they liked in a lead and what type of lead hooked them. Stay tuned for more information about their published narratives, it will be coming in the next few weeks. We are all looking forward to reading their stories!