Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of January 16, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events

Monday, January 23 - Reading Logs due

Tuesday, January 24 - Homelink due

Wednesday, January 25 - Early Release

Thursday, January 26 -  math journal pages: be all caught up

Friday, January 27 - SpellingCity activities due / Home Link due / report cards sent home

General News and Announcements

Breakout EDU

On Wednesday students got to participate in a cooperative activity in the afternoon. If you have ever heard of a breakout room (there are several in Portland) then this is an educational version of that same concept. Students had to solve various puzzles to get the combination or key to unlock one of eight locks. Both classes succeeded breaking out well within the allotted time. Great fun!

In-Class Artwork

Both classes use the other half of Wednesday afternoon to create some beautiful watercolor snowflakes using a crayon resist technique (thank you, Pinterest!).

Help Wanted

I am looking for a couple of parent volunteers over the next week or so to dismantle our award-winning door decoration and to use my iPad and the Book Wizard app to level some books that have been donated to our classroom.  Times for both of these jobs are completely flexible.  Please let me know if you’d like to help out (dmcfarland@msad51.org).

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

This past week students chose an animal to research.  They are putting together their skills and strategies for reading nonfiction to research and categorize information on what’s called a research map.  Through this project, we will also learn about physical and behavioral adaptations, biomes, and food webs.  Later, the kids will prepare a Google slideshow using one of the main idea formats we’ve practiced.  They’ll prepare talking points for each slide, and eventually each child will make a presentation to teach the class about their animal.

    I forgot to mention last week that the students shared their main idea bags!  Each child had the opportunity to look through the items in three of their classmates’ bags and make a guess as to the main idea.  Then, the owner of the bag showed the class what was in the bag, read the three guesses, and announced the main idea.  It was fun to see the creativity and variety!  I graded the students’ main ideas and how well their “supporting details” (items in the bag) matched the idea.    

Writing Workshop

This week we worked on a structure of informational writing: pros and cons.  We made t-charts about topics or situations and listed pros and cons.  Our class t-chart was the pros and cons of being short.  Each writer used a chart of pros and cons vocabulary to then write two paragraphs based on their lists.  We will finish those early this week, and then we will round out this informational writing unit with a focus on compare and contrast.

Math

In math this week students finished the fourth unit and took the end of unit assessment. Progress packets will be sent home next week. Students also worked on a mid-year check up on skills and concepts covered so far this year. We have a little work to do to cycle back and revisit a few concepts in the coming weeks.

Theme

This week students built towers as part of a cross-curricular STEM/social studies lesson. They discovered that building a lookout tower was harder than it seemed, we had many interesting designs.