This Week in Room 120
Week of April 22, 2013
Reader's Workshop
Our lessons on Monday and Tuesday will support the Book Club learning that is happening.
Monday - The students will be taking their stickie notes or notecards and will be writing a reflection of their thinking in their Reader's Notebooks. The stickie note thought will be a jumping off point for their expanded thinking in their weekly letter.
Tuesday - They will also be introduced to blogging this week. Writing a blog is becoming an important skill for students to have. We will be using a blog where the students will be able to post some of their thinking about their Book Club books or any other books that they are reading. This blog will be open to the students in our class only.
On Wednesday and Friday, we will be critiquing and analyzing authors' texts.
Wednesday - The students will be discussing a writer's choice of using words that are not in English in a text. We will be discussing why an author makes this choice and what it adds to the meaning of a text.
Friday - The students will be expressing their tastes and preferences for books that they choose to read. They will need to provide evidence (based on a book's plot, use of language, characters, genre, etc.) to support their opinion.
Reader's Workshop
Writing her letter about her reading
Writing and Illustrating his Diary of an Endangered Animal piece
Writer's Workshop
This week we will be looking at writing prompts and how to answer them well. Students all the way through college are asked to read and respond to generic prompts about a topic or issue. We will be learning how to write focused answers, how to state your opinion with evidence, and how to state the point of view of someone else.
Word Study
Pre - means before
Per - means utterly, completely, very
These prefixes will require the students to think about the base and root words that are attached to them in order to form the words.
Some of the words that we will be studying this week:
precaution, prehistoric, prefabricated, preface, prescribe, prevent
performance, persuade, perfectly, persecution, periphery, persistent
Math
The 8:00 group will begin the week using data from function tables to graph points on a coordinate graph. We will then move onto to starting to study multiplication and division with fractions.
This week the 9:00 math group will begin learning about exponents, square roots, prime numbers, composite numbers, and the prime factorization of numbers. We will take this new learning and apply it to what we already know about the Order of Operations. We will finish the week looking at one- and two-step equations.
Announcements/Reminders:
Monday will be the Gebhardt Celebration of Learning. It will start at 3:30 and end at 6:30. This is a chance to come in and see some of the work that your child has been doing this year.
Please be sure to send back the photo packets that were recently sent home. You can keep and purchase the photos that you would like. The payment and remaining photos should be returned to school. Thanks!
We are in need of more Clorox wipes. If you are able to donate a container, our messy desks would really appreciate it!