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Saturday, November 14, 2015

October is Done, November has begun!

11/13 Our class celebrated!!!  Our Realistic Fiction stories
 are finished!  Took some time to share stories with classmates!
We won a pizza Party for all the boxtops we
collected!  and Pajama Day!!
Students worked in Jigsaw groups to learn about different
plant adaptations and
share what they learned with the class.
First we want to thank you all!  Many of you parent & caregivers donated craft items to our plant model project and let us borrow shovels for daffodil planting! We received many Boxtops for education and our class earned a Pizza Party!!  Also, many of you took advantage of the scholastic book order sent home, your purchases went toward earning our class 5000 points for classroom books!!! Most of all, we want to thank you for making efforts to attend our open house and parent conferences, both of us (Mrs. Paul and Mrs. Boyden)
 
October was a busy month for our class!  We continued our work toward solidifying fact fluency and understandings in Multiplication in Math.  During our Reading and Writing blocks, we embarked on reading discussion groups and continued our Realistic Writing Fiction unit.  In science we explored the world of plants and studied the plant structures that are necessary for growth and survival.  As a culminating project, children created original plant models designed to survive in a specific region.
We paired nonfiction and fiction to combine forces with science and ELA

Children are studying plant parts and seeds.

We crossed curriculums in our exploration of Daffodils.  We read the Daffodil Principle and listened to the story online.  We investigated daffodil bulbs in class, by taking a close look at them inside and out, and diagraming the parts.  Then  we read about how to plant them. Our bulbs are planted along the fence on the playground, can't wait to see the results this spring!

We learned how to make a diagram and improved
the diagram from our reading.


Pairs read for important fact finding about bulbs.

After creating original plants we walked through
our plant "museum".
Students were looking to find out what kinds of different adaptations classmates used in their design.




The Goal/Objective for writing was to begin to plan and write realistic fiction stories.  Children made connections between realistic fiction that we have read in class, in particular, noting that stories all have some type of problem that needs resolution.  STORIES ARE NOW DONE!!  (**Please note:  DONE does not mean "perfect".  Done for this purpose, means that students planned, wrote, and revised over the course of a couple weeks.  For their "final" draft, students needed to reread their stories and look for 5 things to change, improve or fix in some way, from adding more detail, changing vocabulary, spelling and or punctuation.  Editing and revision can be stressful for any writer, this was how I chose to manage that piece for this assignment)