The Bissinger Beacon
January 6, 2017
Thank you!
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had an enjoyable winter break. Thank you all so much for your generosity! I feel so lucky to spend my days with your children.
Writer's Workshop
Authors examined strategies essayists use to support their thesis. Students created parallelism by listing ideas in their own writing. We listened to a very famous essay, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The speech illustrates the use of repeated phrases and focus words to make a strong impact. Students also added conversational prompts such as “this makes me realize…” or “in addition...” to their supporting details.
Social Studies
Immigrants boarded their ships to America! Students wrote entries in their immigration journals focusing on their voyage across the sea to Ellis Island. Actors has a blast performing a reader's theater script about immigrants struggles at Ellis Island! We learned about the both the medical and legal inspections before re-enacting the roles of immigrants and inspectors!
Reader's Workshop
Readers drew conclusions and made generalizations based on text details as we read, Dear Mr. Winston. Students also used non-fiction text features such as graphs and charts to better understand the informational text, Field Guide to Snakes of the Southwest. We identified conjunctions in compound sentences, recognized antonyms in analogies, and studied commas in a series.
Math
Math stars discovered the many uses of fractions as we reviewed denominators, numerators, and mixed numbers. We identified fractions on a number line, compared and ordered fractions as well as found equivalent fractions. Some students challenged themselves to find the least common denominators of two fractions to compare!
A Pep Talk for 2017...
Up & Coming
1/12 Chorus Rehearsal at High School
1/17 Winter Concert