Information Text, the 100th Day, Pen Pal Letters, a Valentine Exchange, Division, and Google Docs

February may have been snowy and short, but we sure stayed busy!

We continue to dive in to informational texts, use text evidence to support our thinking, and become familiar with the format of passages and questions on the upcoming PARCC test. We have been getting experience with constructed response using excerpts and references in the text.

Our 100th Day was jam-packed. Many kids surely dressed the part! We wrote about life as a 100 year old person, brainstormed enjoyed a 100 calorie snack, and enjoyed puzzles using a hundreds chart.

  

We've also continued collecting and analyzing data through our Throwback Thursday and Flashback Friday spotlights. After collecting and totaling students' guesses, we plot the data on a bar graph after determining an appropriate scale. Finally, we draw conclusions and analyze our findings.

Students were eager to respond to their Floridian pen pals. Along with individual letters, students received maps and facts about the Sunshine State. Writers drafted two column notes as they organized their reply. Some shared about how we celebrated the 100th Day, our Valentine celebration, and the heavy snow we had received. 

 

We were fortunate enough to take part in a nationwide Valentine Exchange with 21 other elementary classrooms from Hawaii to Arizona, Oklahoma, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New York to name a few.

  
Topic 7 has introduced us to division! We are finding that multiplication and division are opposite operations and our multiplication facts can help us as we solve division problems.

As we delve deeper into expository writing, we have begun to frame our piece using the expository pillar. Three body paragraphs will focus on three main ideas pertaining to the writer's topic. Some topics include hockey, gymnastics, sharks, Abraham Lincoln, artists' tools, and rocks and minerals. We have also worked together to reconstruct 4 expository pieces using the introduction, main idea headers, and concluding paragraphs as guides on the topics of Abraham Lincoln, the blue whale, Halloween, and types of dogs.

 

Students have become avid users of their Google Docs accounts as they compose friendly letters, practice spelling words, and publish final drafts. 

And don't forget, students' long term math project is due Wednesday, March 11. I am looking forward to students sharing their math breakfast table, colorful and creative array, and fact family.