Week of February 3rd

LANGUAGE

WRITING

The Grade 4’s are working on Procedural Writing. They have written “How to Make Hot Chocolate in Partners” bumping up a level 1/2 procedural writing piece they were given to a 3/4. They also wrote as a whole class “How to Plan Your Birthday Party”. This week they will be writing their own Procedural piece on a topic of their choice and focusing on the revising/editing part of the writing process.

The Grade 5 ‘s are working on Explanatory Writing. They have examined some samples and used those to create our success criteria. They were given leveled samples of explanatory writing and focused on the text features pulling out the information and placing it on a graphic organizer. They were searching for the topic, definition, components/parts, operation, and applications. As a whole class we used the Internet to search for “How a toaster works” and filled in our graphic organizer for our prewrite. This coming week we will write our draft and students will be given time to use our school I-pads to search for information on a topic of their choice that either “Explains why something happens, or How something works”.

Both grades have looked at examples of the text form they are focusing on and created their success criteria.

Procedural Success Criteria

                    Explanatory Success Criteria

In addition students choose a writing goal that they needed to focus on when it came to their writing. Using the 6+1 writing traits learned at the beginning of the year students selected a goal that they know needs improvement in their writing (e.g. revising, editing their work, spelling, punctuation, organizing their ideas, etc.).

MATH

Decimals!

Students have been doing a fantastic job using their prior knowledge of place value of whole numbers to help with our decimal unit.

We have already looked at reading decimals properly.

E.g. 5.6 = five and six tenths

We compared and ordered decimals, and came up with some great strategies to add decimals. This coming week we will be focusing on equivalent decimals, subtracting decimals, and solving word problems involving decimals.