Sunday, December 16, 2012

December 17-20

We went above and beyond on our donations for the girl we adopted! Thank you so much for all of your donations. After purchasing the shoes, we had money left over that we were able to put towards another child in need. Thanks for showing that Caraway Cares! 

We will have our buddies, a mime presentation and a great choir performance in school this week!  This is a great way to end the semester on a high note!

WRITING:
We will have no spelling words this week to test over.  I know the class will be so upset!

This week, we will focus on letter writing and making lists.  Whether our letter is a persuasive one to our parents, a reindeer job application, a poem to a cup of hot, delicious cocoa, or telling the season Winter what it means to you, the students can enjoy thinking outside the traditional holiday box.

READING:
Daily 5 will continue along with guided reading groups. The class has enjoyed making inferences this past week and we will continue to study main idea and making predictions.  We will point our the difference between main idea and supporting details in a reading passage.

MATH:
This week is a review of all things math!  We will review with some winter themed math games to cover all the topics we introduced this semester.  To end the week, we will have our math benchmark.

SOCIAL STUDIES:
Our study on historical figures is coming to a close.  Our class did a great job on researching, writing a final report and creating a visual for their project.  It's time to present them to the class!  My hope is this project had the students thinking about what their contribution in their life will be.

REMINDERS:
Dec. 19 - Class Holiday Party
Dec. 20 - Last Day of Fall Semester
Dec. 21- Jan.6 - No School

Friday, December 7, 2012

December 10th-14th

WRITING:
We are working on finishing our All About books this week. The topics ranged from All About Computers to All About Pizza! Later on in the week 
will be a stinky, smelly, rotten combination of adjectives, alliteration and illustrations.  We are dissecting The Grinch's characteristics that made his heart so small and coming up with ways to make him grin.  We will move on to illustrating the lines of The Grinch song and putting it to video.  It will be quite a production!

READING:
Daily 5 will continue along with guided reading groups. The knowledge igloo is filled with facts that have frozen in our brains! The students have loved finding out facts about all the types of penguins! Ask anyone how long an Emperor penguin can hold its breath under water!  

We will work on how to inference and making predictions with pictures and texts and main idea with filling out fish bones and banana split sundaes!  This should make us crave more for main ideas!
  
MATH:
We will build on our pattern knowledge and move into Input/Output tables.  This will involve finding the rule from a robot, machine, patient and more to find what comes next in the pattern.  Students will use vocabulary of increasing by and decreasing by to state the rule and continue the pattern until they find their answer.

A review of tables and patterns will be on Thursday and we will assess this Friday.

SOCIAL STUDIES:
Our study on historical figures will continue with our independent research project. The students selected a historical person on Friday that they wanted to learn more about. This individual study will go through the process of gathering more facts from Pebble Go and library books, writing a research report and creating a model of what that person looked like.

If you have spare fabric, buttons, string.....anything scrappy or crafty....we would love your donations!  The writing and making of the models will be done in class, so all supplies will need to be at school by Tuesday.

REMINDERS:
Dec. 17 - Family Art Night
Dec. 19 - Class Holiday Party
Dec. 20 - Last Day of Fall Semester
Dec. 21- Jan.6 - No School