Learning To Go Mr. Avery's Class on the Web 

It must be spring! Last week, students across the school helped with the annual “turning the mulch” in preparation for the re-opening of our playground. Next Saturday, families are invited to help build flower beds using materials donated by Home Depot. There will be live music, community spirit, and more! Please come if you’re able, and sign up for a task if you can (I see our class will be well-represented–thank you!). For more details and sign up: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0848a9a92da13-community

With just 8 weeks to go, students will learn to use technology to communicate and evidence their thinking through the use of student learning blogs! They will learn to navigate online environments, including posting, commenting, and replying; to create, find, and upload media such as images and audio files; and to collaborate with peers through reading and writing. This week, we will learn what it means to be part of an online community and how safety rules of common sense apply there as well as in real life. Then we will learn what a digital footprint means and how to create a safe one, as well as how to stay safe online. A note on safety and privacy: Student blogs are created via Kidblog.org. They are only open to invited peers and teachers. Once up and running parents will be invited to view them as well with a private password. For more information, please visit their site. Lessons on privacy and more are taken from Common Sense Media.

Our final lessons on telling time will focus on calculating time before or after (elapsed time). Notice the example above. Students have previously learned to tell time to the hour and half-hour, and now they are being stretched to apply that to new situations requiring a deeper understanding of time. In case your child struggles with this during homework, encourage them to try it with a toy clock or this online clock with movable hands (visnos.com):

Students investigated liquids in containers of different sizes and shapes, eventually deducing that water takes the shape of the container it is in, and the level of a liquid stays parallel to the earth. This week we will investigate water on the earth. How much is there? What do we use it for? And how much of it is potable water, necessary to sustain human life? These are introductory lessons to a study of water conservation we will conduct as part of Floral Goes Green 2017. More to come on that!

 

Literacy Night was a big, noisy, joyful success! Kudos to all our writers who proudly shared their hard work, and to the many volunteers who made this special Floral event an occasion to remember.

 This week we revisit Author’s Message with the purpose of developing critical thinking skills at a deeper level. We will learn common Themes from children’s literature (lessons like Believe in yourself; Always tell the truth; etc.) and apply them using fiction texts. Then we will learn to read closely and find evidence from the text to support our claims, and compare themes within and among texts. When your child uses a piece of fiction for reading homework, ask him/her to think about the themes that emerge over several pages or chapters of a book. And Scholastic has some great ideas on finding themes in books, movies, and songs at home:http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top_teaching/2011/02/helping-students-grasp-themes-in-literature
This week we begin Chapter 14, which teaches kids to tell time to the 5 minutes on an analog clock; write the time in numbers or words; correctly identify AM and PM; and solve problems involving elapsed time (minutes or hours later/before). Check out the graphic above: students are being taught to identify time using the hour and minute hands; to tell minutes of any hour by counting “5s” around the clock; and to use those skills to calculate time elapsed. Here is a link to a great online clock from ABCya.com that kids can manipulate to read the time in analog and digital format, and to use it to play games. Try it out! Just navigate to this page, select “Practice,” and click “GO”: http://www.abcya.com/telling_time.htm And here’s a great song we’re using to help us tie it all together, from Readeez:

In science this week students will explore water in different containers to learn about prominent features of liquids: their levels remain parallel to the earth, and their molecular structure causes them to take the shape of the container they are in. Here are some shots of us exploring a variety of liquids to learn more about their properties!

The countdown is on: Just 10 more weeks left in the year! The kids have made huge strides since the start, and I’m proud of their perseverance and accomplishments. We have a jam-packed end of the year in store. Here’s this week:

Photo Source: Autism Speaks

Light it Up Blue! This week marks Autism Awareness around the world. At Floral St. School, we are committed to serving the diverse needs of Shrewsbury’s population, including students whose needs lie within the autistic spectrum. In class, we will learn to understand the unique learning and behavior styles that accompany autism, in an effort to strengthen our school community. We will also share in lessons around inclusivity and bullying, culminating in our School Meeting this Friday. Here’s an awesome song and book we’ll be sharing school-wide, called Don’t Laugh At Me.

Video source: broche4me via Youtube.com

Our CAFE focus is on Determining Importance in fiction texts. Being able to identify the main idea of a story is crucial to understanding it. This week, students will be taught to find the most important part of a fiction text as the place where the character learned his/her lesson, or where the story changed and set course for the ending (at the end of the climax usually). For explanations and tips for working with young readers at home, check out This Reading Mama’s helpful blog: Determining Importance with Fiction.

As we begin the last trimester of school, students will return one last time to narrative writing. What’s important by year’s end is that they write several paragraphs of a story from their lives that include an entertaining beginning; description; a main event that stretches out the moment; transition words; and an extended ending. It’s by far the most complicated writing they’ll do. This time around, students are being treated to focus lessons from Mrs. Richard, and writing with me, while I teach poetry to both classes!

In math this week, students will further their understanding of measurement by learning to develop a sense of how big inches are and applying that knowledge through estimating and actual measuring. Consider the picture above from the student eBook: notice how it pushes kids to understand how big inches are; how many inches long common objects are; and to apply those ideas by comparing lengths. The last big idea is to solve real word problems involving length, height, and distance. At this time of year, kids should be able to model such problems through bar models and/or parts-and-total frames.

Having conducted engineering designs based on properties of solid objects (see pics below!), students will now investigate properties of liquids.  Using a variety of materials in bottles, they will look, listen, spin, roll, tip, and otherwise manipulate these systems to discover the similarities and differences in the viscosity, amount of bubbles and foam, color, and transparency of common liquids around us.