Biweekly update, February 12th

We finally had some snow, and had two days off of school!

Reader's Workshop
We continued our work with folk tales these weeks. We started reading some retellings by an author and illustrator named Gerald McDermott. He loves to tell folk tales, and makes all of his own illustrations to go with the story. When he writes one, he does research on the art techniques that match the part of the world the story comes from. He tends to retell stories from Native Americans and from many different countries in Africa and Asia. We read Monkey, Anansi, Zomo, and Raven. Many of these are trickster tales, in which the main character has to be clever to escape from some bad situations. Many of these are also "just so stories" that give a story about how something in the world was created or made to be how it is today. For example,  Raven offers an explanation of how the sun got into the sky.

We used two different structures to help us analyze and compare these stories: a t chart and a Venn diagram. These help to categorize information and are great pre-writing tools.

Writer's Workshop
We are still writing our own versions of folk tales. We included a couple of techniques to make our writing interesting: dialogue, comparisons, and the rule of threes.

Next week, we will start to think about finishing, revising, and publishing our work!

Math
We wrapped up our work on multiplication and moved on to measurement. To start, we had to make a bed for a very demanding king.

Science
We are working on flooding! We read the book Follow the Water from Brook to Ocean and played a game about the water cycle. We read about what floods were, then had to discuss whether we should allow floods to happen or try to stop them. Next, groups of scientists developed possible solutions to a flooding problem, ranging from creating a system of pipes that would divert flood waters away from the town to building a fleet of submarines for people to live in during flooding events. In the end, we picked four possible solutions to focus on: building a wall or dam to control or divert the water, building a system of pipes or moats, turning people's houses into houseboats, and creating an early warning system that would give residents advance notice so they could escape to higher ground during flood season.  One of our colleagues also mentioned that using multiple systems to create redundancy would be a good idea, in case one of them didn't work. We will not be testing using marshland to capture flood waters, but this is a technique used very often in the real world.