Welcome back! It was so great to see all of their smiling faces walk through the door. I enjoyed hearing all of their stories about their vacation and they're still filling me in on things they forgot to tell me before. However, we are having a rocky time settling down into the swing of things. Hopefully next week will be better. I will not be in Thursday and Friday. Thursday I will be with my family and this weekend I'll be burying my great aunt and my grandfather. If you email me, I cannot promise that you would hear from me, but I will try to respond if there is time and as quickly as possible.
Math: We are moving back into fractions, which focuses on equivalent fractions. They are essentially learning about reducing fractions such as 6/12 and 5/10 into 1/2 and 6/8 and 9/12 into 3/4. We are learning to do so using a number line, and manipulatives. However, I also showed them how to use division to help them as well. We had to do a quick refresher on the fraction lessons that we covered, especially those with the number line, but they quickly got the hang of things. The actual challenge for them is to explain their answer. Today in class they were asked how could they explain that 5/6 was greater than 3/6 using fraction strips. A lot of them wanted to say that 5 is bigger than 3, which is true. However, they need to use the math vocabulary and explain that by using the fraction strip, you can see that the fraction 5/6 has more parts shaded, or more unit fraction parts than the fraction 3/6. Once we climbed over that hurdle they seemed to be more confident. Reading: The essential question for the week is "how do teams work together?" The curriculum has a focus on emergency team, and rescue dogs. So we discussed this question both in terms of emergency teams, and regular teams. We discussed the many important components of a team, such as communicating without yelling or anger, supporting each other, and being prepared. We also learned how these emergency teams are important to natural disasters such as wildfires. We learned that are three different forms of a wildfires (crown, surface, and ground). We also learned that wildfires are bad, but they have some positive effects as well, such as trees who need heat to release seeds can now do so, and it create new places for trees and plants to grow. For grammar we are working on pronoun verb agreement. On Thursday, they will jump back into the stories that we've had to push to the side a lot this year. The goal is to have those done by next Wednesday. Science: We are switching the way we do things in terms of homework. Along with the lesson check assignments that thy've done, they will also start reading a page or two in their science books and answering the questions that follow. This will not happen combined, nor will be it be an everyday thing. We are talking about matter and its components. We conducted a sound experiment where they had to use their listening skills to categorize the materials that they were given (paper, fraction strip, binder clip, paper clip, Popsicle stick, and coin). After the conducted their experiment and grouped the material they were asked to explain how they grouped them using the properties of matter (hardness, size, texture, shape, and color) that we had learned. Friday, they will learn the different ways they can measure the mass of something. They will then be given an opportunity to predict the mass of a range of objects, and then they will test to see if their hypothesis was correct. Social Studies: We finally jumped back into our textbooks and have come full circle with our community discussions. We are learning about the very first communities, the Native American tribes that lived there, and the explores who came over searching for the Americas. We will take a deeper look at each of the different communities, the tribes that lived there and the explorer(s) that came. Important Dates:
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