McFarland-Mayberry-Begley Bulletin

for the week of December 7th

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, December 14th- Reading logs due / Planner sheets due

Tuesday, December 15th - Home Link due / Box Tops due!

Wednesday, December 16th - Math Box Catch-Up night

Thursday, December 17th - Spelling Due! / ABL

Friday, December 18th - Home Link due / Recorder forms due

In take home folders, you’ll find a notice from Mr. Saunders, our music teacher.  After vacation, the children will be learning the recorder.  Students may already own a recorder, or you may purchase one, or you may borrow one for the year.  Everyone -- even if you already own a recorder -- is expected to please mark your choice and return that green form by next Friday.  If you are purchasing a recorder, also send $5 (cash or check payable to GMS).

On Tuesday, December 22nd, our team will hold its annual Celebration of Reading Day.  Students are encouraged to wear pjs or comfy clothes and bring a pillow, blanket, and favorite books/magazines/activity books, etc., for a cozy day of reading.  Any items your child brings (pillows, sleeping bag, etc) will need to go home with them that day, so please plan accordingly.  

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

This week, we have established some norms for our work in our new nonfiction unit.  Students will stick to nonfiction during reading workshop time, and can choose whether to read nonfiction at home.  We also have had a very successful text features quiz!  The vast majority of both classes achieved 100% correct!  With that behind us, we will get to work with other concepts to increase comprehension with nonfiction text, the most important of which is identifying the main idea and supporting details.  This is very difficult thinking, because it demands the ability to step back and look at the “big picture” of a text and ask, “What does the author really want me to understand?”  And then: “What details support that idea?” These learners are whole-to-part learners.  ORRRRRRR, some readers need to consider the details first and use those to determine that big idea. Those learners are part-to-whole learners.  So, I’ll teach it both ways.

    We’ll connect it to the boxes and bullets format we’ve used in the essay unit.  We’ll use a variety of texts: National Geographic for Kids magazine articles, leveled texts from the reading program, nonfiction texts in our classroom, short video clips, and maybe even throw in some other “fun” stuff.  And after vacation, we’ll start a big research project to combine all these strategies!

  Due to a big book order, we are lucky enough to have a bunch of new books in our library!  Thank you!  We got our hands and eyes on them today, and inhaled the unmistakable scent: New Book Smell.  Aaaaah!

Writing Workshop

To begin our Informational Writing: Personal Expertise unit, we have studied carefully one informational text and have identified text features writers use to organize their writing.  And it’s pretty helpful that they’re learning about those as readers, too!  We are also going to get to know a couple of high quality informational books to use as mentor texts, so we can study the writing moves of authors in order to strengthen our own pieces.  

    So far, students have made webs about topics they are experts on, and they are categorizing information into subtopics.  We have also studied the Informational Writing Checklist from the writing program, and we are using that to decide different ways to write information: compare/contract, pros/cons, and cause/effect (ask your child the example of cause/effect we used in class...Say, “Boo!” to jog her/his memory).

    I’m still trying to decide on the format of the final projects; I’m leaning toward books as opposed to posters so kids can use tables of contents and chapters effectively, but the jury is still out.

 

Math

Developing strategies to find equivalent fractions dominated our math lessons this week. Students also started to do work around comparing fractions to determine whether a pair of fractions is greater than, less than or equal. At home you can help make our fraction work have deeper meaning by sharing ways you use fractions in the real world and giving your child an opportunity to use them as well. Holiday baking is a great time to work with fractions!

Spelling

This week students participated in another word building activity and looked at the soft syllable endings of er, or, and ar.

Theme

This week students finished their culminating project for the Colonization unit.  Each group printed a draft of their presentation and one feedback session with me to go over any missing/incorrect information and to fix spelling, capitals, and spelling.  It was then up to them to make the changes.  I am working on grading the projects right now.

    Next week we will do our second STEM scope.  STEM scopes is a science curriculum with an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math.  I piloted the program last year and now we are bringing it to the whole 4-5 staff.  Students completed their first scope within the rocks and minerals unit.  The scope we’ll do before vacation involves learning about waves.