Here's what's coming up next week:

• The Veteran's Day Assembly is Monday, November 11th, from 2:00 - 3:00 pm.
• Service Team for participating students is on Monday, November 11th, until 4:15 pm. 
• We will have an early release day on Wednesday, November 13th.  Students will be dismissed at 1:40 pm.  
• We will have our Realistic Fiction Writing Celebration on Friday, November 15th, from 9:00 - 9:45 am.  Look for an invitation to come home on Monday!

Math

     During Math this week, we focused on the different strategies of multiplication, including using repeated addition, drawing equal groups, thinking of a special saying, and more.  Students also practiced solving for variables in both multiplication and division problems.  Use learned and used several new terms: factor, product, prime, composite, multiple, quotient, and fact family.  Later in the week, we worked on a challenging story problem as a team.  Students worked cooperatively to solve the problem and present their findings to the group.  

Eliza explaining how her group used skip counting to solve the problem.  

Molly, Colton, & Isabella explaining the entire problem from start to finish.  

Reader's Workshop

     During Reader's Workshop this week, students created a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast All About books and Narrative Nonfiction.  We learned that all about books give us facts using features that make it easy for us to find the most important features. Narrative Nonfiction is written like a story with characters that includes true information. We have to be careful when reading Narrative Nonfiction because the author might infuse his or her own opinions about the topic. 

    We also learned about schema. Schema is the background knowledge and life experience we have.  Our brain likes to organize information into groups, kind of like file folders, as it stores new learning.  Everyone has different schema because we have all have had different experiences in our lives. Activating our schema about a topic before we read can help get our brains ready to read actively and acquire more knowledge. 

Social Studies 

     In Social Studies we completed our Informational Text posters to show our growing schema for the first residents of Missouri. Come down our hallway to check them out!  Each student used special features to make the most important information stand out. 

Writer's Workshop

    We completed our final edits on our Realistic Fiction pieces by punctuating dialogue correctly and using Google and Dictionary.com to make spelling adjustments. Students learned about several ways writers title their work: a place, a feeling, the problem, a character, etc. Then they tried a few titles and thought about which would best motivate a reader to pick up their story.