NEW BOOKS and other Updates

READING

We are immersing ourselves in nonfiction for the next several weeks. We are starting with text features and text structures (sequence, compare/contrast, description, cause/effect, and problem/solution). This week we talked about description and its relationship to headings as well as sequencential nonfiction and its relationship to a cycle (diagram) or timeline.

We also got a whole bunch of new books for our classroom! Many of the books were purchased using Scholastic Book Club points.
Several of the books are favorites series books to update or series books the students have been asking for more of. The other half of the purchase was made on multiple copies of nonfiction books so we can start some nonfiction book clubs next week. The students are pumped and signed their names next to any of the books that looked interesting or that they might want to try.

While students were signing up for book club books and series books Max and I sat down so he could "booktalk" his current independent book. He demosntrates how to retel important parts of a story, he makes comparisons to a different book within this series, and describes events and characters with details and examples. Take a listen.

WRITING 

We are wrapping up our realistic fiction unit of study next week! The students have been working hard to try different points of view as well as different perspectives of narrators--whether it was a character within the story narrating (first person point of view) or a narrator on the outside of the story (third person point of view). Our chapter book read-aloud is Wishtree by Katherine Applegate and is a first person narrated story told from the perspective of a tree (a character within the story).

MATH

Our current math unit is all about measurement and allows us to apply multiplication/division as well as addition/subtraction understandings. A couple weeks ago we began experimenting with permimeter and this past week focused more on area. We tried out lots of different shapes with multiple areas and perimeters and discovered that sometimes shapes can have the SAME area but DIFFERENT perimeters or the SAME  perimeter while having DIFFERENT area measurements.

GRAMMAR AND WORD WORK

Throughout our reading and writing we are always finding ways to apply what we know about grammar rules and spelling rules we are learning. Through our realistic fiction unit we have been able to review and apply everything we know about action verbs, adverbs, adjectives, proper nouns, common nouns, and especially pronouns. When decoding vocabulary words or unfamiliar words within our reading (especially vocabulary within nofiction) students are able to apply their understandings of vowel chunks and patterns. We are going to begin working on suffixes and prefixes next week.