Classroom Update

Social Studies: We have finished out unit on exploration and discovered the many trips of different European explorers. Below are a few pictures from our week of presentations (Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures for most, but the students agreed posting a few would be ok :)

Writer's Workshop: Last Friday students finished their persuasive essays! Your child can share their essay with you by logging on to their Google Docs account. We used this technology to peer edit our writing. Students learned to give helpful feedback instead of fixing the work for their partner. We have many convincing essays on animals, environmental concerns, homework, sports, and many more. 

Math Workshop: We have completed more work in fraction concepts focusing on understanding word problems by drawing a visual and writing an equation. Students also worked on a collaborative math mini project on Friday. Students "acted" out a wall painting situation with colored paper to determine the solution to the problem. Groups of three created a poster to clearly show their thinking to others. 

Reader's Workshop: We have begun our non-fiction reading unit to coincide our non-ficiton writing unit. Students have set a purpose for reading non-fiction text as well as looked at various non-fiction text features. We discussed how these features help us to understand the information in the text and thought about which ones we may use in our informational birds of prey text in writer's workshop.