Weekly Snapshot: 2/12 - 2/16

Reader's Workshop
We thought a lot about dialogue this week. Authors use dialogue to make their stories more interesting to read, and to show you what different characters are saying. Dialogue is a great way to move a story along without having to just tell your reader everything that is happening. There are several important conventions we use to show dialogue, and we looked closely at these this week.

Writer's Workshop
We started to think about the play we will perform later this spring!

We worked on our own versions of Little Red Riding Hood. We were careful to include dialogue in our stories, and to choose interesting words to use to indicate who is saying what, and how they are saying it.

Math
Monday was the 100th day of school! We did many math activities to celebrate, including taking 100 steps down the hallway to see how far we would go!

We continued to work with multiplication of 2's, 5's, and 10's. We worked on word problems that require multiplication or skip counting. Here is one we tried:
Jake has 7 jars. Each jar has 5 pickles in it. How many more jars does he need to have 45 pickles in all?

You can practice skip counting by these numbers at home! Have your little sister or your dad or your grandmother pick a number you should start on, then skip count from there!

Science
We constructed and tested flood protection solutions that would save our houses from a stream table flood. After we tested, we identified strengths and weaknesses (we call them plusses and deltas), then wrote about what happened with our strategy.

We also tested solutions to prevent a stream from eroding the land. Each group could use just 1 material. We had: sticks, rocks, a clay wall, a cardboard wall, and window mesh.

Social Studies
Ms. Notaro came in to talk with our class about the "zones of regulation." What are the zones? Each zone represents and energy level and emotional state that you might have, from low-energy blue to very high red. Have your student explain what the different zones are, and some strategies to move back to green.

News and Other Information
Our morning meeting questions:
- What is your favorite game?
- How do you show kindness?
- What is a talent you have?
- What are you doing for vacation?

Weekly Update: 2/5 - 2/9

Reader's Workshop
Our read alouds:
- Little Red, by Bethan Woollvin
- Little Red Riding Hood, Jerry Pinkney
- Little Roja Riding Hood
- Interstellar Cinderella
- The Stinky Cheese Man
- The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig
- The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
- Little Red Riding Sheep

We used Venn diagrams to compare two versions of Little Red Riding Hood. We identified 8 essential elements in the Little Red Riding Hood story. We went back in time and acted like the Grimm brothers, looking at similarities in three versions of the same dialogue.

We read Billy Collins' poem, "My Hero." This is a play on the tortoise and the hare story, but has a lot of interesting elements to discuss.

Writer's Workshop
We did a lot of work with describing this past week!
- describing objects in a scene
- playing a describing guessing game to practice providing details about an object in a setting
- writing a descriptive passage to match our geometric illustrations from last week

Then, we started planning our own versions of Little Red Riding Hood. We had to plan out the characters, setting, solution, and what will be different.

Math
We started the farm game! Ask us how it works.

We started our next math unit, multiplication by 2, 5, and 10. We practiced skip counting, and did a lot of work with arrays. We also did some very difficult work with equations. In an equation, the equals sign means "the same as" and everything on both sides needs to balance. Here is one of our tricky problems: 6 x 2 = ____ x 2 + ____ = _____ . It was hard not to just put 12 into the first blank!

Our second tricky problem was from a book called Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar. In this book, there is 1 ocean, with 2 islands in it. Each island has 3 mountains, and each mountain has 4 walled kingdoms. Each kingdom has 5 villages in it. We had to figure out how many villages were in the whole jar! This was very tricky, but drawing a visual model was a great strategy to help when we got stuck.

Science
What happens when water runs over the land? To investigate this question, we made some stream tables with sand in paint trays. We developed a way to do fair tests so we could compare our results in a scientific way. We did a few experiments with these stream tables:
- water running down with just sand
- water flowing down with a house on the sand
- developing and building ways of protecting the house from the flood
- looking at three kinds of riverbanks, and how the materials prevented erosion

Our Stream Tables 2018 from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.

News and Other Information
Two of our morning meeting questions:
- If you could have tickets to any concert, what music would you want to hear?
- Would you rather come face to face with a giant octopus or a dragon?

We had fun playing in the snow!

Last Week, Today: 1/29 - 2/2

Reader's Workshop
We time-traveled to 1963 to look at the island of Surtsey. We read a scientific article about this island, and talked about the kinds of vocabulary you see in scientific articles. We also looked at the main idea of each section, and thought about why authors break up this information into paragraphs to make it easier for you to read.

We also started our folk tale unit. We read many versions of Little Red Riding Hood, came up with a definition of folk tales, and thought about why people tell them. If you have a favorite version of a folk tale at home, bring it in and we will try to find time to read it!

Finally, we read Robert Bly's poem "Driving to town late to mail a letter". There is a lot to talk about with this poem, and we had a great no-hands discussion. We also looked at the vocabulary Robert Bly uses, and sorted it into three tiers.

Writer's Workshop
The first half of the week we finished our remaining how-to books. We will do some simple publishing and then send them home!

We also looked at the book Picture This, by Molly Bang. We tried our hand at making our own illustrations of a scene from Little Red Riding Hood, using simple geometric forms to stand in for the characters and setting. Next week, we will use these illustrations as a jumping off point for some work on descriptive writing.

Math
We reviewed bar models and two-step problems. Students have a good grasp of these concepts!

We worked on a math assessment for Mr. MacLellan to see how our addition and subtraction skills are coming along, and what we still need to work on.

More work on multiplication is coming up next week!

Science

We tried to make floating islands. Guess what? We couldn't! There aren't any floating islands, because islands are land surrounded by water, and the materials that make up land are too dense to float. That means that under an island is more land, all the way to the bottom of the ocean/lake/river/other body of water.

Then, we received a memo from Dr. Sigurdur Thorarinsson about the new island of Surtsey. New in 1963, that is. We needed to test various coastlines to determine what would happen to this island as waves wash against its ashy shore.

News and Other Information
Some of our morning meeting questions this week:
- Who is your hero?
- Would you rather go deep underwater or deep into space?
- Would you rather live somewhere cold or somewhere hot?

Baby Ingrid missed her daddy, but he gave her some light reading to do while he was at work all week.