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The Latest and greatest in room 35:

Week of October 8^th – October 26^th

Math:

Over the last few weeks students wrapped up Module 3 (NBT.5 & 6) and their OA work. We’ve been working on Module 4, Geometry, which also includes some MD or Measurement and Data standards (with regards to angle measurements). Students took a mathematical practices check-in quiz and will also be gearing up for a cumulative NBT check-in quiz. It’s likely we’ll wrap up Geometry in the next 1.5wks and will begin Fractions (NF) or Module 5 the first full week of November.

Science:

We our finishing our environments unit and are preparing for a cumulative test and speech in the next week or two. Then we’ll be awaiting our next kit for Solid Earth. Key vocabulary and concepts:

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms or environmental factors/components that live and interact with each other and with the nonliving environmental factors or components. The living components, or organisms, in any environment/ecosystem have a range of tolerance for all environmental factors, but also a set of preferred and optimum conditions in which they would choose to live. In every ecosystem there are food webs, which include: producers, consumers, and decomposers, and show the feeding relationships between organisms, as well the competition for food resources.

Social Studies:

Students wrapped up their unit of study and project about the natives of CA and how they used ecosystem goods to survive, or how they changed their environment to help them thrive better in the various CA regions. They have been learning about Europeans who explored and settled California, with an emphasis on Spanish missionaries and soldiers who helped establish the first CA missions and colonies. Vocabulary to be familiar with: physical features, landforms, bodies of water, land use, economy, agriculture, ecosystem goods, ecosystem services/industries, population density, urban, suburban, and rural communities, the four hemispheres, Cardinal and Intermediate directions, absolute locations using lines of latitude and longitude, & the characteristics of all four CA regions – Coast, Valley, Mountains, Desert + natural systems, native vs. non-native species, self-sufficent

Writing:

We are finishing up with our unit on informational and literary summaries and are well into our drafts for our long term writing project (due November 16^th), a fictional narrative utilizing Greek allusions (+a character map and changes chart). Coming up we will be diving in deep to study essay structure and will be using that structure to write opinion pieces.

Reading:

We have paused some in our literary analysis work to start looking at informational texts and analysis. We’re utilizing our Storyworks magazine subscription to work on various nonfiction reading strategies, taking notes in the reading section of our binders to cement key learning. Don’t forget: Each night (Monday – Thursday) you should expect that your child has a minimum of 20 min. of HW reading, along with logging, and stopping and jotting. They need to stop and jot their thinking about their main character every 4-5 pages, putting the page number they stopped on at the bottom of their post-it. The post-it format should be: When I read “____________”, (here they write down the phrase/sentence of textual evidence from the page they stopped on, which made them have a thought about their main character) it made me think/infer __________ (here they write a character trait/adjective the phrase/sentence made them think about their character) because __________ (here they explain why the trait is accurate or likely – referring to something they read/learned earlier in the book about the character, or background knowledge they have about life/how people are or how people usually act/behave).