We have been studying narrative and informational texts. Narratives are stories, and texts aren't just things you write on your phone. Any piece of writing is a text! They don't all include emoji, though. We studied the author and illustrator Peter Brown to find examples of narrative texts. The writers of narrative texts want to entertain you.
We are reading books by the author and illustrator Gail Gibbons to study informational texts. In an informational text, the author's purpose is to teach you something. Next week, we will be looking at features of informational texts, and using a Venn Diagram to compare the similarities and differences between narrative and informational texts.
Writer's Workshop
We continue to write narratives. Students have some very interesting (and sometimes creepy!) problems in their stories. We talked about using "star" words: words that are exceptional and interesting and you wouldn't normally use them. We looked at examples of books where authors use star words. Peter Brown, Christopher van Allsburg, and Kevin Henkes all use this type of word frequently! We also looked at some examples of stories that include feelings. We made a list of different feeling words, and used them in our narratives, too.
Math
We are learning about addition! We can add two three digit numbers together in a fast and accurate way. We are working on reading and understanding story problems involving addition, too.
Try giving your student two three digit numbers to add together (with an answer that is less than 1,000), and see how they do!
Science
We developed and completed a self-assessment of our work with raisins. Here's what we looked for:
We started to learn about matter. Matter is the stuff that everything in the universe is made up of. Matter can exist in one of four phases: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasmas are found in extremely hot environments, such as the sun, so we won't be experimenting with those! Most of our work in the next few weeks will focus on solids and liquids.
We compared water and a wooden block, conducting the same experiments in the same way with both materials to have a fair test. We tried dropping the block, dropping the water, dropping a block on the block, dropping a block on the water, and dropping water on the block.
Social Studies
We are looking at and constructing maps!
We also learned about early migration and settling of the Americas 15,000 years ago by the peoples who became the modern-day Native Americans. They lived in North and South America for many thousands of years without people in the rest of the world knowing that there was land or people there. We learned that the earliest explorers and settlers from Europe were the Vikings, who sailed to Greenland and Canada more than 1,000 years ago. They built small villages here, and eventually left or died out, and few people outside of their world found out. Finally, the European explorer Christopher Columbus sailed westward in 1492, looking for a sea trade route to Asia. Instead, he found some islands in the Caribbean, and - on subsequent voyages - landed in the Yucatan peninsula and what is now Brazil.
Number(s) of the Week
7 - We have seven senses! I always thought we had 5 (smell, touch, taste, hearing, seeing) but I learned this summer that we have two more: vestibular and proprioceptive. The vestibular sense relates to our understanding and feeling gravity and movement. The proprioceptive sense is our understanding of where the parts of our body are in space. My 7-month-old son is still developing his proprioceptive skills when he tries to grab objects.
93,000,000 - We are about 93 million miles away from the sun. This is an approximate number, and the exact number changes depending on where we are in our elliptical orbit of the sun.
Other important information
We visited the garden! Check out the blog post about that.
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