Plans Week of November 3, 2014

Tropical Rainforest by Olivia D.

Highlights from Last Week

• We got a great new piece of technology --the clickers! Students have a little remote on which they can submit answers. My computer tallies the results instantly and I can help students who missed certain questions. The students love them!

• Students worked in partnerships to create a food web poster using data from Yellowstone National Park. They learned how energy flows from organism to organism. 
  
• We played a fun game in math to practice classifying polygons. Students took an assessment on polygons. A little reteaching on my part is necessary since most students missed the same questions on comparing polygons.
  
• I gave students a packet on Antarctica to practice responding to reading. We have a lot of work to do in this area to help students write clear, complete, and accurate responses to their reading.
  

What We Didn't Get To
We missed a session of Book groups on Friday because I couldn't resist letting students enjoy Brain Pop videos that help them with the Science MCAS. The videos are just so much fun!

Special
This week on Thursday we will meet for the first time with our first grade book buddies and read together.


Reading
Here are the reading lessons we will work on this week:
We will continue to meet in our book groups and have lively discussions about the text. We will:

• Compare and contrast two or more characters in the stories using specific details from the text.
• Quote accurately from the text when we explain what the text means and also when we draw inferences.
• Describe how a narrator's point of view influences how events in the story are described.
• Determine the meaning of unknown vocabulary and figurative language.

When students are not meeting with me in their book groups, they will be:

• Reading assigned chapters from their group book and "Power thinking".
• Reading and responding to assigned texts.

• Reading independently.
• Finding, defining, and using new vocabulary words.

Writing / Social Studies
This week we finish up our personal narrative unit. Students have a few more edits to make before we publish them all. 

After we finish our narratives, we're going to hold off on starting our next writing unit, Informational Writing. Instead, we are going to combine writing with Social Studies, teaching students how to take good notes and organize their research. We'll focus on the following:

• Use the "boxes and bullets" note-taking strategy.
  
• Write clear, complete, and accurate notes from research.
  
• Cite your sources!

Math
Here are the math lessons we will work on this week:

• Review how to classify polygons and compare properties of polygons. Take a follow-up quiz and correct the Unit 3 Math Assessment.
  
• Begin Unit 4 on Division by reviewing the relationship between multiplication and division.
  
• Use the partial quotients algorithm to solve division problems. The focus is on place value.
  
• Dividing decimals using the partial quotients and estimation.

Science

• We finish watch BrainPop videos on Life and Ecosystems, then we practice taking Science MCAS questions to test our understanding.
  

Social Studies
 As mentioned in the Writing section, we will be learning about history through reading and research. Here are the topics we will be researching this week:

• Native Americans: How did the environment a tribe lived in affect the tribe's culture and way of life?
  

Thanks for Reading!
So that's the plan for the week. Please feel free to email me with any questions, comments, or concerns.

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