Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of January 2, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events

Monday, January 9 - reading logs due

Tuesday, January 10 - Home Link due

Wednesday, January 11 - half day, Main Idea Bag project due

Thursday, January 12 -  math journal pages: be all caught up

Friday, January 13 - Home Link due

General News and Announcements

On our long Wednesday afternoon this week students had the opportunity to do some activities in preparation for our Japanese exchange student visits. Our students watched several videos about the daily routines of elementary students in Japan and noticed how their school day differs from ours. They were especially surprised by the lunch programs in the Japanese schools. Try asking your child how school lunch is served in a Japanese school! Students also got to try their hand at eating popcorn with chopsticks. Also, they helped to create a special display of fish flags used to celebrate Children’s Day in Japan. Next Tuesday our students will have some face to face conversations with our special visitors from Japan.

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

If your child came home and told you that we’ve been watching TV in reading workshop...well, s/he might not be completely wrong.  We watched a brief National Geographic video about lobsters migrating and a second one about how chimps use tools.  The kids used two different graphic organizers to record the main ideas and the supporting details.  This is another form of “text” in which authors/narrators are expecting that we understand the jist of what they’re presenting.  The challenging parts of this task are identifying a main idea that isn’t too broad and isn’t too specific and also making sure that the main idea is written as a complete sentence (as opposed to more of a title or heading).

    Please take note of the Main Idea Bag project that came home today!  Please guide your child to form a complete sentence for the main idea and to set aside time between now and next Wednesday (the due date) to gather items.

Writing Workshop

I am almost finished scoring essays!  I have been pleased to see that most students have a firm grasp of the organization of an essay, and in their work I see evidence of the instruction, especially with the use of transitions.  A number of students incorporated different kinds of evidence: a mini-story, a statistic, and/or a quote from an interview.  A glaring need is the lack of sentence structure.  I have some ideas as to some ways to work on that during this next informational unit.

    Speaking of the informational writing unit, we are starting off with the concept of cause & effect.  We’re using some worksheets to practice identifying and writing causes and their effects.  The kids will do a short writing piece next week to show their knowledge about this concept.  The unit will also include short writing pieces focused on pros & cons and compare & contrast.  Again, there will be a heavy focus on sentence structure.  Oh, yeah -- and editing!

Math

In math this week students reviewed unit 4 skills taught before the break, did some work with converting metric measurements of mass (kilograms, grams and milligrams) and tackled some multistep problem solving. One thing students have noticed is that careful reading of the problem and really thinking out the steps needed to solve the problem can really improve their accuracy.