Room 13's Class Blog: Happy Spring Break!

In Readers' Workshop, students are learning to pay attention to "Memory Moments". Specifically, we're identifying how these flash backs make characters feel in the present. Their present feelings help us make grow ideas about conflict throughout the book.

In Writers' Workshop, students are creating their own book trailers, using their literary essays as reference material. Today, students generated a list of events that happened throughout their stories. They then starred the most significant. We used this list to create purposeful phrases about texts in our book trailers (using PowerPoint and eventually Movie-Maker to complete these).

In Math, students noticed similarities in fractions of wholes and fractions of sets. They used their reasoning to make sense of equivalent fractions.

In Science, we explored the purpose of stems. We used celery and red water the discover how the stem works and helps the rest of the plant.

In Read Aloud, we read a few chapters then students created symbols to represent Melody (see below). We engaged in a Gallery Walk to view others' ideas and share our thinking. Then we reflected on our learning "I used to think Melody... Now I think...". Using these "visible thinking strategies" fosters critical thinking and reflective learners. Over break, while your child is reading, try some of these strategies: use playdough to create a symbol that represents a character-- encourage your them to defend their symbol with evidence from the text; use "I used to think... Now I know..." to have conversations about character change and theme.