This website will give parents an overview of what is going on in Room 208.
It will discuss current progress in various subjects, discuss upcoming events and deadlines,
and announce special achievements. I will update this website monthly. As always, if you have
any questions, I am available in person, by email on my regular school email address, or by
phone.
FEBRUARY UPDATE
READING- It was most gratifying to see how well the students did on the Unit Three Benchmark Test. The test results show that they are making excellent progress with comprehension and study skills. We are now working on Unit Four in the Scott-Foresman basal reader, Seeing is Believing. This unit focuses on the skills of Paraphrasing, Compare and Contrast, Text Structure, Summarizing, and Plot. The work the students are doing in their weekly skills packets shows that they are mastering these skills, developing a fine sight vocabulary, and growing in their ability to comprehend what they read. The three reading groups are enjoying the novels that they are reading: Anastasia Krupnik by Lois Lowry, Pocahontas and the Strangers by Clyde Robert Bulla, and The Midnight Fox by Betsy Byars. The students have made excellent progress this year in expressive reading and are reading aloud with feelings appropriate to the mood of the book. While I am working with one group at a time, the rest of the class is reading silently in their Just Right book which they have chosen from the large paperback collection in our classroom. They use post-its to mark pages they want to comment on in their Reading Notebooks. These notebooks are collected every other week so that I can read them and respond to their thoughts about what they are reading. Book reports for the second marking period are due no later than Friday, March 9th.
MATH--We are currently working on Unit Four in Everyday Math, which focuses on decimals. We completed the unit on fractions and took the post test on January 27th. We are working on the relationship between fractions and decimals, learning that they both make it possible to discuss parts of a whole thing and that 0.4 is the same as 4/10, and 0.25 is 25/100. The students have been using the Base Ten blocks to show numbers that include decimals. For example 2.26 could be shown with 2 flats, 2 longs, and 6 cubes. They also are drawing pictures to show that 0.3 is more than 0.15. Once a week, we go to the computer lab to work on FASTTMATH. At the start of the new year, every student was switched from the addition program to the multiplication program. It would help their progress if they could practice their facts at home using flash cards.
WRITING-- Last year, the Lexington Public Schools adopted the Lucy Calkins Units of Study for Teaching Writing. This is a detailed, structured program which involves mini lessons, guided assignments, conferencing with students, sharing samples of good writing the students are doing, and a brief wrap-up three days of the week. Right at the moment, the students are involved in writing a fiction story, having planned out the characters and setting and developed a good plot with a definite beginning, middle, and end. Starting on Feb. 6th, we are going to stop in the middle of these stories and put them to one side for four weeks in order to work on a research report during our daily writing block. We will pick up the creative stories following the conclusion of our reports on March 9th.
SOCIAL STUDIES---Our current unit is The Geography and History of North America. Starting on February 6th and continuing until March 9th, the students will be working on a research and report writing unit focusing on some aspect of our overall unit such as: choose one US state and report on areas like population, land forms, crops grown, etc. or choose a famous explorer of North America and report on his travels; or choose a historical event such as the arrival of the Pilgrims, the settlement of Virginia, the Viking settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. The students will learn about plagiarism and how to avoid committing plagiarism by changing the words of the source into their own words. They also will work at home on a visual display to accompany their written report. The students have completed their large maps of North America, and they are on display in our classroom. We will continue our lessons on the various areas on the United States comparing and contrasting things like climate by using a series of DVDs on U.S. Geography for Children.
SCIENCE--We continue on our unit on The Solar System. We are just about finished with our study of Our Moon. The students have completed a log book of the phases of the moon, having recorded the time of moon rise and moon set, the phase of the moon, and a picture of the appearance of the moon every day for one full cycle from New Moon back to New Moon. We also have discussed what the moon is like, what are the differences between our earth and our moon. We are planning to have the Lexington Science Coordinator Karen McCarthy come to our classroom to help with a three-station lesson on Moon Phases, Craters on the Moon, and Meteors and Meteor Dust. Finally, we will have a quiz on facts about the moon, and move on to a study of our very own star--Our Sun.
t