Posted by kavery508 | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on April 3, 2017
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:
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.
