April 2015

Language Arts

In Writing Workshop students are publishing their animal research brochures. They have researched the diet, habitat, interesting facts, and physical description of their rainforest animal, and are in the process of writing organized paragraphs and creating text features. This is the final project in our informational writing unit.

Later in the month, we will launch a unit on opinion writing. Students will choose a subject of a biography they read in April to develop and opinion piece, as well as creating persuasive speeches, petitions, and editorials on topics they feel strongly about.

In Reading Workshop students will bring forward all they have learned all year about various genres. Students will find connections between genres, for example, the story structures in fiction are related to important elements in biographies. Students will be reading passages and responding to questions, with a goal of reading flexibly between genres. Students will learn to preview the text to ascertain its subject and structure, make a quick reading plan and break the text into manageable chunks. Then, when students read across these chunks, they can use strategies to summarize, synthesize, and determine where any difficulty lies and use the appropriate strategy to cope with it.

Mathematics

Students will be learning about fractions. They will work with area models and the number line, as well as fraction strips. They will learn the fractional units of halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and eighths.  To build flexible thinking about fractions, students will be exposed to additional fractional units such as fifths, ninths, and tenths. Students will actively partition different models of wholes into equal parts. Towards the end of the month students will compare fractions that have the same numerator.  As students compare fractions by reasoning about their size, they will understand that fractions with the same numerator and a larger denominator are actually smaller pieces of the whole.

Science

Student began their third science rotation, Structures of Life, with Ms. Chitsaz.