Weekly Updates 1/25- 1/29

NEWS/EVENTS

• Today Caitlin Johnson, our fabulous spring intern from Teacher's College, joined our classroom! Caitlin will be with us four days a week during literacy blocks, and will be joining us for reading and writing minilessons, small groups, book clubs, and more. We are thrilled to have her with us.
• Next Friday from 8:50-9:35 the third grade Science Fair is taking place. Families of participating students are invited to attend.
• On February 5th Family Friday is taking place!
• We are in the process of planning a field trip to the Central Park Zoo for the week of 2/9. Our visit is to support and enrich research in animal book clubs. For the trip we will be looking for 5-6 chaperones (one per book club) so we can move about the zoo with greater ease. Once final paperwork is approved a trip slip will go home as soon as possible.
• Spelling tests will be passed back on Tuesdays from now on. Students will glue old tests in Word Study notebooks.

HOMEWORK

Monday- Read and jot for 30 minutes, write words in categories in word study notebook, Group Math HW

Tuesday- Read and jot for 30 minutes, Have spelling test signed, Group Math HW

Wednesday- Read and jot for 30 minutes, Word Study Menu Option, Group Math HW

Thursday- Read and jot for 30 minutes, Glue words into categories in purple word study notebook and study for spelling test, Group Math HW

Friday- Reading Response, Group Math HW

CURRICULUM

Reading- Now that students have been researching animals in their research book clubs, they are compiling notes and growing ideas about their observations. 

Writing- After analyzing mentor texts of opinion based writing, students are generating their own possible claims by considering problems and solutions that could make the world around them a better place. We will draw on strategies from Baby Literary Essays to develop and craft our speeches (reasons with supporting evidence).

Math- Students have been learning about using the distributive property as a strategy to calculate area for quadrilaterals and other composite shapes.

Social Studies- We plan to visit two more Nigeria centers this week (statistics, maps, comparing and contrasting, artifacts, photographs, video clips of student life). Students are learning how to categorize notes into sections.