September Update
What Students Will Learn
In Reading Students Will
Be able to work together to create a strong learning community and develop their perspectives on the essential unit question: How do people work together to create a strong community?
Students will finish reading Sarai Saves the Music, a novel about a young girl who inspires others to work with her to save her school’s music program. Students participate in interactive read alouds, practice engaging effectively in discussions, using context to determine the meanings of words, quoting accurately from the novel, and discussing how the challenges to which Sarai respond help the address the novel’s theme and the unit’s essential question. At the end of the novel, Sarai learns that others outside of her learning community have also worked to help make the community stronger.
Students will take a deep dive into the unit’s final text, Ghost. As a character, Ghost spends as much time trying to run away from himself as he does trying to run toward his goal of becoming the next Usain Bolt. This also interferes with his ability to interact well with his classmates and running teammates. In exploring how Ghost is similar to and different from other characters who might help him to respond more effectively to the challenges he faces, students will gain a deeper understanding of the kinds of relationships that must first exist before people can effectively work together. Students continue to participate in Think-Alouds and discussion, focusing on the novel’s use of idiom and metaphor, its development of Ghost’s similarities to and differences from other characters, and the relationship of the novel’s theme to the essential question.
In Writing Students Will
Students will engage in writers’ workshops and participate in activities that will foster a view of themselves as a community of writers. Students will set up and use a writing notebook, practice techniques for planning and developing their writing, and focus on the personal narrative genre. Sarai Saves the Music and Ghost will be used as mentor texts, providing examples of such narrative skills as establishing a situation, introducing and developing a narrator and characters, and using dialogue to engage readers. Students will begin to conference with the teacher regarding what they are writing. In addition, students will have ample opportunities to plan and share their writing in pairs, with the teacher, and with the class as a whole (on a voluntary basis). Throughout Unit 1, students engage in whole group, paired, and even some small group discussions about the core texts. They consider how sharing and building upon one another’s ideas creates knowledge, but is also an important part of creating a strong learning community. As speakers and listeners, they reflect about how all the ways they work together is helping them to build a strong community inside the walls of their own classroom.
In Word Study Students Will
Focus on adding vowel suffix -ing to closed syllable words and then moves to Syllable Juncture patterns (VCCV, VCV, VVCV, VV, VCCCV) [V=Vowel, C= Consonant] examining contrasts in both spelling and meaning.
In Math Students Will
Topic A- Place Value Understanding for Whole Numbers
Students use multiplicative comparison statements to explain that a digit in one place represents 10 times as much as what it represents in the place to the right. Students notice how digits of a number shift when they multiply or divide by a power of 10 and express a power of 10
in exponential form. Then students find products and quotients by using powers of 10 and convert metric measurements from larger to smaller units.
Topic B- Multiplication of Whole Numbers
Students build fluency with multiplying multi-digit numbers by using the standard algorithm. They use place value understanding to visualize the decomposition of factors while they multiply a single digit at a time by another single digit in the standard algorithm.
Topic C- Division of Whole Numbers
Students use methods based on place value to find quotients of whole numbers with up to four-digit dividends and two-digit divisors. They estimate quotients, then use tape diagrams, area models, and vertical form to record quotients and remainders.
In Science Students Will
Students engage in their first investigation with the Patterns of Earth and Sky Simulation and use the data they collect to create a physical model that helps them understand where stars are located in space. Students investigate the distance from Earth to the sun and to other stars using the Patterns of Earth and Sky Simulation. Then, the class uses data that students have gathered to make a scale model of Earth, the sun, and four other stars. As students position the stars in the scale model according to their relative distances from Earth, they see that the sun and Earth are in close proximity, while other stars are spread far apart and across the room. From these activities, and from gathering additional evidence in How Big Is Big? How Far Is Far?, students learn that the sun is the only star in our solar system. All other stars are very far outside our solar system, spread in all directions and at distances that are almost beyond imagining.