Hello Families!

I hope your week is going well!  We are so busy with lots of great learning.  Next week is the Innovations Academy Book Fair!  I hope you can put it on your calendar to stop in before or after school with your child to find some new reading material!  We are lucky to have so many parents involved in making this special event.  In our class, some students have been getting the decorations ready!

How do pineapples go with a book fair?  

Find out next week when you come!!!

The setting phase of our Build-Your-Own-Story project has been interesting.  The students are listing descriptive words to help when anyone writes a story or scene taking place there.  This has been a process of identifying adjectives and also noticing when a word is not really a word.  Many of the students have been using the dictionary to check their spelling.  We need to use the bigger dictionaries now because the smaller ones just don't have the types of words friends are looking up.  This has been a fun exercise in thinking of synonyms, too!

Many of the students are making revelations about coins and are feeling more confident in calculating their value.This week we "bought" new items for our class again.  We spent some time focusing on each coin- looking up what the symbols on them are representing and also practicing counting with them.  Here are some webpages that we referenced:

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/math/money/coins/penny/

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/math/money/coins/nickel/

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/math/money/coins/dime/

Next I gave the students a hand full of these two coins.  The partners first calculated what they had and then decided if they could purchase anything.  The big excitement was that four groups decided to work together to buy the big item: a new dictionary.  This group counted and re-counted each time a partnership added their money to the lot.  The whole class cheered when they realized they had the three dollars they needed.  One student was impressed that they made $3.00 using only two kinds of coins.

We are always noticing new teams in words.  The students have added a new level of diligence to their lists.  They still list words they see or know that has that letter team, but they have also been asking friends if they have any to add and also using the dictionary.  In this go around, the students have had to do another step: checking their words to see if they do, in fact, use that team.  Many are still in process of weeding out the words they thought do, but do not use that special team.  English has so many rules broken, so this is a great challenge.  It is nice to watch the students as language researchers!

Our "How-things-work" diagrams are coming along, too.  Many students have studied other diagrams and used peer critique to help them make sure that they are conveying all the information.  The question always remains: How much information do you include?  What info will be extra that may confuse the reader?  Here are some works in progress:

Thank you for reading our blog together with your child each week. Please continue to bring in the excited learning you and your children do at home.  This stimulates so much excitement when friends bring work in to share!  Have a nice week, Jennifer