Wednesday 1/23
I'm starting a blog today. With the help of my students, I hope we can show the learning that occurs in our class. We started our day today by checking out the new 21st Century jobs associated with our new iPads. Our class was luckily chosen as one of the two classes who will pilot the iPad cart of 12 iPads. They are so exited.
During our Reading Workshop, we continued to read our mentor text, "The Sweetest Fig." The class is enjoying the author Van Allsburg as they use their inference skills to predict, use fix-up strategies when they come across an unfamiliar or interesting word, and support their thinking with text evidence or schema.
During our test prep we looked at test taking tips. We also focused on the author's purpose. As we read a passage, students predicted the author's purpose. We all agreed that it was difficult to determine if the author wrote to persuade or inform. Using our schema, we made text-to-text connections and decided this was an informational piece.
We also practiced answering open-ended questions using QASI. My class is becoming quite proficient in successfully answering these types of questions.
In Math, we explored remainders in division. The students decided whether they had to ignore the remainder, round the quotient up, or report the remainder as a decimal.
Thursday 1/24
As part of a school-wide initiative, 5K and 1M participated in the Valentines for Veterans Project. Congress asked school children to make
homemade valentines for the vets that are currently in the Veterans
Administration Hospitals.
Our class has been working on Inferencing. We are using text evidence and schema to make inferences about what the author does not tell us directly. We are making plot inferences (predicting what will happen next), character inferences, and unfamiliar or interesting word inferences.
In writing, we are learning that our writing pieces should begin with an attention grabbing hook. We are applying these hooks to our writing.
