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

Shrewsbury firefighters were present throughout our school last week, leading lessons on fire safety and prevention! Their commitment to our town and its kids was evident in their presentation and interaction during a special school meeting our class attended on Friday. Many thanks for all they do!

 This week’s new comprehension strategy is predicting. Always, the #1 thing we want students to do when they read for meaning is to think about the text. When we do that, we can’t help but make predictions–predictions about where a story is going next; predictions about what language or vocabulary we will likely encounter next; predictions about answers to our questions that arise when we read. Equally important is to check our predictions, or guesses, as we read on, and adjust our thinking accordingly. It’s what helps us learn new things and it makes us engage with text, building our lifelong learning skills. Here’s a short article on predicting with ideas for making connections to science at home: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/making-predictions

This week’s math introduces students to a new concept in measurement: the broken ruler. Check out the example above. Here, students are being taught to develop an understanding of length that goes beyond lining up a ruler at “0” and reading the number at the end. You will see examples of it on this week’s homework. Students need to count the centimeters when measuring and comparing in order to understand what the numbers involved mean in terms of length. We will also be learning to represent lengths using bar models. For a reminder, see the bar modeling section of the homework packet from chapter 4.

As we continue our exploration of weather, students will conduct daily observations of temperature, clouds, and weather type over the next month. We will then analyze the data, look for trends, evaluate methods for presenting data (e.g. bar graphs vs. pie charts for example), and draw conclusions of winter weather in Shrewsbury. In addition, this week we will conduct a further investigation into evaporation designed to test the idea that all liquids evaporate the same way that water does. We will also learn to identify cloud types and use that to predict the weather. Weather Wiz Kids  is a fantastic site for learning more about and all things weather. And here’s a  favorite, Bill Nye the Science Guy, teaching about how clouds are formed.