Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of February 27, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events

Monday, March 6 - weekly reading logs due

Tuesday, March 7 - Home Link due

Wednesday, March 8 - early release

Thursday, March 9 -  math journal pages: be all caught up

Friday, March 10 - SpellingCity activities due: short o with no o / Home Link due

Monday, March 13 - weekly reading logs due

General News and Announcements

Welcome back to our newsletter and full 5-day weeks of school!

Academic Updates:

Reading Workshop

Mrs. Mayberry and I have been collaborating for our historical fiction unit in reading workshop.  She is spending a few days to give students background knowledge on the same time periods that I am focusing on in reading.  This week that is slavery.  In reading class, we have read several books set in the time period of slavery in the United States: Barefoot: Escape on the Underground Railroad, Henry’s Freedom Box, and Freedom Song.  The latter two are stories about Henry “Box” Freedom, a slave who escaped to the north by mailing himself in a wooden crate.  We compared and contrasted the details of the stories, using the Authors’ Notes to help determine what information is factual and to help us understand why authors might have different details.  

    The reading skills we are focusing on right now are envisioning and empathizing.  Next week, we will add identifying a theme and synthesizing details.

Writing Workshop

We are in the heavy-lifting work of writing a literary essay, and we are working HARD.  We have reviewed how to write a strong thesis statement and how to build a solid plan for the essay.  We are writing the first one together as a class, and the collaboration has been lively and productive.  Students are showing off their close reading skills and are truly analyzing the text to support ideas.  This unit is truly a culmination of lots of reading and writing skills from throughout this entire school year!  

    Next week, we will draft supporting idea paragraphs that include evidence from the text, transitions, and explanations as to why those details support our ideas.  This is the kind of work I was doing in eighth grade!

Math

This week students finished up with the last few lessons in unit 5. These lessons included finding lines of symmetry and determining types of angles. In addition, we spent time reviewing unit skills learned before vacation. Next week students will take the unit assessment and we will be starting unit 6.

Next up: long division! Brush up on those multiplication facts please.

Theme

To help support students when reading historical fiction in Mrs. McFarland’s reading class I taught several lessons this week covering the topics of slavery in the United States and the Underground Railroad. Students watched several short videos, BrainPops and listened to a book called, Freedom Over Me by Ashley Bryan. Students brought up a lot of questions and reactions as they learned about this period in our history.