Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of September 18, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, September 25: reading logs due

Tuesday, September 26: Home Link due / McFarlands have P.E. (wear sneakers) Wednesday, September 27: early release

Thursday, September 28: be caught up on math journal pages

Friday, September 29: Home Link due

Monday, October (what?!) 2: reading logs due

General News and Announcements

*reminders for reading logs:

• The majority of kids are meeting those minimum expectations of reading and logging at least 4 days and for 25 minutes at a time.
• Please make sure that your kids are coming to you to have you sign the log before coming to school on Monday.  My message to the kids is, “It’s not your parents’ job to remember to sign the log; it’s your job to bring it to them with a pen or pencil and ask them to sign it.”  To help make this a habit, a parent might ask, “Is there something you need to ask me to sign before school tomorrow/Monday/today?”  After a few weeks, that should become more the child’s task to do the remembering and asking.

Looking for: yarn!

If you have yarn just taking up space and would like donate some to our classroom we will gladly take it off your hands.

Digital maker community celebrates

skill building and creativity for kids.

Does your child love to create, invent and innovate? Check out this awesome site!

https://diy.org/ This site is for the inventors, artists and creators of the future and is highly rated on Common Sense Media.https://www.commonsensemedia.org/website-reviews/diy

Academic Updates:

Writing Workshop

This past week, we have been doing more practice planning with timelines.  The kids also wrote a short silly scene based on an illustration.  Together we studied the picture, and then we created a very brief timeline.  From there, the kids were to use storytelling language to write the scene, focusing on setting details, small actions, and TFR (thoughts, feelings, and reactions).  Then, they color-coded their writing by underlining in certain colors each kind of detail.  They used this visual to determine what kinds of details need to be added and where.  We used Post-it notes and a number system to revise, in order to help create a balance of kinds of details.  

    Soon, they’ll apply all of this learning to a narrative of their own.  Next week, we’ll get deep with determining a message for a narrative (“What are you really trying to show?  What’s your point?”).

Reading Workshop

In Reading Workshop this week, we started reading a novel, Journey by Patricia MacLachlan.  I’m reading it aloud to students and am using it to teach strategies about reading deeply.  This book is a level S, and I’m showing them what the author of a higher level text expects them to do as readers, besides understand what’s going on (“Don’t worry, Mrs. McFarland, this book is a level X, but I understand everything that’s going on…”  :).

    The book starts with two quotes, plus a scene that is written before the start of chapter one.  So, we just skip those, right?, so we can get into the story?  No, silly!  The author put those there for us to think about, to come back to as we read the book, to connect to parts of the story or to the story as a whole!  Here are Layla’s notes from our discussion:

     In the handful of pages we’ve read so far, we’ve come across symbolism and alliteration, and the author is showing us the characters’ feelings through their actions.  Readers are expected to infer characters’ feelings by paying close attention to those actions.  We are also beginning to get picky about the differences between a character’s feelings and her/his personality traits.  Feelings are like the weather; they can and do change, often.  Traits are like the climate; they change slowly, if at all, over a long time or if something major happens.  I’ll teach them that if you can explain to your child the difference between weather and climate.  Deal?

Math

In math this week students started working with the traditional algorithms for both addition and subtraction of large numbers. This is the way you and I most likely learned when we were in elementary school! We also spent time playing several math games and one that really seems to have helped to solidify the concept of rounding large numbers is called Spin and Round. Below are some pictures of students engaged in this great skill building game.

Theme

Our North America maps are done and they look great. The cartographers worked hard to produce a map that showed quality work throughout.

    This week we started our first Mystery Science unit called The Birth of Rocks. In the first lesson students were asked to consider this question: Could a volcano pop up in your backyard?  The lesson had students plot the location of volcanoes on maps.  They discovered that volcanoes are typically located near the Pacific coast and when plotted on a map the volcanoes form a linear pattern known as The Ring of Fire.