Literatura
The highlight of this week was our 5th annual Pumpkin Run! Students went through he writing process to produce an expository piece, to inform our SWS audience about this much anticipated fundraising event. Be sure to read our published pieces next week on our Spanish bulletin board. In literacy this week, we also continued working on our book club, Con carino, Amalia. Students have done a great job during literature circle in class, as well as keeping up with their home assignments. We look forward to completing our first book club successfully next week. Other literacy objective this week were to:
- Apply listening comprehension strategies when listening to a narrative piece (En dos mundos: una familia esquimal Yup’ik)
- Understand the purpose and characteristics of an informative piece.
- Write a magazine article.
- Enunciation and intonation in Spanish. Read with fluency applying rhythm patterns.
- Grammar, usage and mechanics: Suffixes.
Ciencias
Students grappled with the size and distance relationships among Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. They worked together to build a model of the Earth/Moon/Sun system. To work on this project, students had to integrate mathematical concepts such a multiplication, division, proportions , measurement and vocabulary such as circumference, radius and diameter. Students concluded: The Moon is much smaller than the Earth and orbits at a distance equal to about 30 earth diameters. The sun is 12,000 Earth diameters away from the Earth and is more than 100 times larger than Earth.
Next week we will start working on the next part of our investigation 2: The Solar System!
History & Geography
This week we continued to learn about the Renaissance. Our objectives were:
- Explore and gain better understanding of Brunelleschi’s dome of the Florence Cathedral
- Explore and gain better understanding of Michelangelo’s Dome of St. Peter’s Basilica
- Understand the early history of Venice
- Describe Venetian society in 1500
- Recognize Venice’s contributions to the art and ideas of the Renaissance
Next week we will be doing a messy art project on Monday, please have your student come to class wearing clothes that can get dirty!
Mathematics
Solving some Halloween word problems!
We created our own word problems then used them to prepare for the test!
This week we finished our unit on Whole Number Division and Multiplication. Our objectives were:
- use effective strategies to solve multi-step problems involving multiplication and division
- express and interpret the product or quotient appropriately
- Review real-world multiplication and division problems
- Review using patterns to help multiply and divide numbers
- Review simplifying numerical expressions using the order of operations
- Review using multiplication and division to solve real-world problems
Students did a great job on the unit test! This test was very tricky and most of the questions involved multiple steps. Next week we will begin Fractions and Mixed Numbers
English Word Work
This week we completed our rotation. Our rotations days were:
- Vocabulary Day: We dug through our math text books for words to add to our word wall. The words we found were variable and reciprocal.
- Spelling City: Students had a chance to get on the computers and practice their computer skills and spelling
- Writer’s Workshop: Students were able to edit/revise a writing piece they had already been working on and begin a new Halloween writing piece
- Blind Sort Test: Students tested each other on their spelling using the Blind Sort method.
Our next spelling test will be on Oct. 31, Halloween!