Morning Meetings: We continue to meet as a team for morning meetings. During our morning meetings, we learn about our Students of the Week, listen to morning announcements, , learn technology with our iPads, work on writing journals, investigate math problems, and work on literacy skills like editing, inferring, etc. In the last couple of weeks, we also learned our Innov8ors cheer for this year. We are super-excited to share it! Please see the additional tab that features names of our students of the week. We are very proud of them for standing out as following the Jefferson Way and using our SMART ways of behavior expectations in the classroom.
Group Guidelines and Behavior Expectations: Our POD continues to work together to develop student-driven guidelines on expectations in the classroom and school. We made posters as small groups with our POD brainstorming cards that we did in our morning meetings. The posters display the TRIBES agreements and share what it looks and sounds like. We understand that these are the SMART behavior expectations:
- Safety First
- Mutual Respect
- Attentive Listening
- Right to Participate/Pass, but Listen
- Tolerance/ Appreciation for all
We have been establishing routines in transitioning between classrooms, small group centers, and activities as well. We made posters to establish what these look and sound like too.
Math: Our math groups have been in full swing for awhile now. We have our morning seminar in which we have been reviewing the math strands prior to our state testing. Then, we meet with our teachers in small groups in the afternoon to learn and practice Number and Operations in Base 10, our current unit. We rotate among the various centers (Workshop, Investigation Station, Collaboration Corner, and PLP Place). We are using various tools on the iPad and making real-world applications of our learning as we go. Some students are even making up their own restaurant, using specific math skills to show this off! Please check out the blog's Math Resource area for links to various math apps or websites that we are using in class.
Literacy: Our teachers leveled all of us during September and did a number of shared reading lessons about Health and Nutrition, our inquiry unit, to show us how to monitor our thinking. We continue to make reactions to the texts we read, including articles on KidBiz3000. We also are making thinksheets like the FQR-Facts, Questions, and Responses--to help us determine important details. This will enable us to pull out the main ideas and important details to use in a summary.
We also are tying in our guided reading groups and writing workshop to our unit on Health and Nutrition, by focusing on reading fictional books that deal with our emotional well-being and writing about important moments in our lives. Our guided reading books' themes include family, wellness, bullying, and friendship. We have been put into guided reading groups and are reading fiction books to help us with reacting to realistic fiction and learning more about this genre. Our writing workshop is encouraging us to become writers and making us realize that we all have a special story to share about an important person, moment, or place. We are learning to focus our writing on one specific moment and developing that story.
Words Their Way: Everybody is in a specific group with word lists that should come home every week. Every Monday we get our word lists and are expected to sort the list and write it down in our Word Work notebook. The following is the list of activities for each day, which either we complete at school during Daily Five or at home if we don't get it done in school:
Monday: Definitions
Tuesday: Synonyms
Wednesday: Antonyms
Thursday: Sentences and/or paragraph
Friday: Quiz on ten of the words from list
Anyone scoring lower than a 70% will need to have their test signed, which usually comes home on Monday. 100% tests are rewarded with a raffle ticket.
Inquiry: Within our inquiry unit on Health and Nutrition, we are using reading and research strategies to explore different elements of health and nutrition. We have visited the website www.kidshealth.org to read articles and view videos that deal with health, while we also take notes and ask questions. We also worked on developing a research web about the human body as we read from a book about Human Body Systems. We will continue to work on various inquiry skills and eventually work towards collaborating with partners about a specific health topic.
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