October 31

General Studies with Dawn

We’ve covered a lot in our first full week in a while.

In writing students continue to work on their Realistic Fiction Stories which we look forward to sharing with you at our Publishing Party on Thursday, November 21.  We have been focusing on the concept of Showing Not Telling, and many students are beginning to use descriptive dialogue and action in their stories. We have also talked about the difference between telling a story and writing a summary, which is more of a list of events.

In math we continue to work with factors, including prime numbers and composite numbers. We have talked about strategies for figuring out he factors of a number including knowing that all even numbers have 2 as a factor, all numbers that end in 5 have 5 as a factor, and all numbers that end in 0 have 2, 5, and 10 as a factor. We continue to work on fluency of multiplication facts, as a solid grasp of multiplication facts will help a lot in the upcoming work.

In social studies we continue to learn about explorers, this week learning about Juan Ponce de Leon who landed in Florida and claimed if for Spain (while searching for gold and the Fountain of Youth).Next up: Vasco Nunez de Balboa and Jacques Cartier.

This week we also spent some time preparing for the Hannah Senesh Tekes.  In pairs, students read about an important year in her life, wrote a summary of the event, and created an illustration.  This will all be put together as a timeline of her life to be shared at the Tekes.

And lastly, we visited the third grade to listen to and compliment their small moment stories. Students seemed to enjoy the trip down memory lane.

Looking forward to meeting with you at the upcoming Parent Teacher Conferences.