A new week, and a new look!

Over the weekend, I rearranged the ENTIRE classroom to make the small-group work spaces more accessible, as well as more space for all of us to move around.  I will post pictures of the redesigned Room 25 this week, so stop back sometime soon!  Here is what is happening this week:

Language Arts
Word Study
Coming home on Tuesday will be the graded Word Study quiz we took last week along with a packet of Word Study work completed during workshop time the past three weeks.  These were graded strictly on a participation-basis; where a "check-plus", "check", or "check-minus" were given based on the completion status and organization of the work.  From now on, this will be how I grade the Word Study work done in class.  Keep in mind we review and discuss these words on a daily basis before we start every Reading lesson.

This week's words will not change from last week.  The spelling pattern for all the words are /u/, /oo/, and /yoo/.  The students will have until Thursday to finish any Word Study work during workshop time in preparation for Friday's quiz.  Here are the words again to help support them at home.

Reading
This week we will be continuing our lessons revolving around theme, as well as comparing themes in similar stories.  I will be sending home a reflection sheet tomorrow for the kids to practice identifying the theme in a book they are reading at home or a television show they watch (I promise it's for practicing THEME!).  Along with theme, we will be focusing on characteristics of Traditional Literature (Myths, Legends, Folktales, Tall Tales), as well as beginning discussions about analyzing characters.  A book report will be sent home on Friday that will focus on this specific skill (due by the end of October).  I will post a link to the actual report in next week's blog.

Writing
Finishing up our persuasive essays by Wednesday/Thursday.  Next week we begin narrative writing!

Science
Science began last week with a observing onion cells through a microscope.  A graded quiz and a few work samples will be coming home on Tuesday.  This week we will be classifying living things (organisms) into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.  We will be focusing on this for the next few weeks.  Here's a diagram to jog your memory.

Math
Last week was the introduction of multiplication and using models to solve word problems.  Hopefully the link to Think Central is helping support you at home.  Again, this site includes interactive games and access to the homework and student GO MATH! books.  Let me know if this is/isn't helping and I'll make adjustments on the blog.  This week we are focusing on:

• Lesson 2.3 - Multiplying by 10's, 100's, and 1000's
• Lesson 2.4 - Estimating Products (Wednesday and Thursday)
• Lesson 2.5 - The Distributive Property

Have a great week and please let me know if you have any questions of concerns about anything.