Plans Week of May 5, 2014

Last week was a great week! I thoroughly enjoyed launching our book groups and I think students did too. They also excelled at working quietly and independently during reading workshop while I met with each of the book groups. 

A highlight of the workshop was working on the R.A.F.T. writing, which stands for role, audience, format, and topic. After reading an informational text about cougars, students had to write from the perspective of a cougar, with an audience of a human tourist, in the format of a journal, on the topic of daily life as a cougar. We'll be sharing student work on Monday.

Here is the plan for this week:

Math MCAS session 1: Monday
Math MCAS session 2: Tuesday

Reading: We'll continue meeting in our book groups this week. When students are not meeting in their groups, they'll be working on the reading workshop activities. Our story this week is called, Lunch Money, by Andrews Clements. It's about a boy who has created his own comic books and sells them at school. After I read part of the story aloud, students will work in partners or trios to relay read the text on their own. They will then complete a Reading Report to analyze the text. We will also read about the history of comic books in a related informational text.

Writing: For this week's R.A.F.T. writing, students will take on the role of Greg, the comic book creator from Lunch Money. Their audience will be the principal of their school. The format will be a persuasive letter. And the topic is persuading the principal to let them sell their comic books at a booth in the cafeteria of the school. Should be a fun role-playing writing assignment!

Math: Once the math MCAS is out of the way, we'll return to and finish the concepts on multiplying fractions in our Go Math books. We'll review two ways to multiply mixed numbers and how to reduce fractions to simplest form. We'll also work on area problems and scaling that require fraction multiplication.

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