Finishing May in 209

The school year may be wrapping up, but that doesn’t mean that we’re slowing down in room 209!  Here are some updates on what we’ve been working on:

Reading

This is the time of year when I administer the spring round of DRAs to students in order to get an updated reading level for students.  I’ll be sure to share your child’s spring reading level so that you can help to match your child with just-right books during the summer.  Remember, your child doesn’t have one single level and, instead, has a range of just-right levels.  There are many factors that an impact the suitability of texts, including familiarity with the topic, character voice, the sequencing of events in a text, etc.  Also, several weeks ago, students started bringing home black and yellow book bags (pictured to the right) with just-right texts from school.  While they’re still encouraged to enjoy their own books from home, using this book bag helps to ensure that they are coming home with a book that’s appropriate for their own level when reading at home.  I’ve enjoyed getting to discuss with students the books they’re reading and enjoying at home!

Writing

This year, we flip-flopped our expository writing unit and narrative writing unit in order to take advantage of some teachable moments earlier in the year.  So this spring, we’ve been working on narrative writing.  Our guiding idea has been the thought that “Writers write about what they know.”  Our lessons have been based on this idea, including activities that brainstorm experiences based on feelings, descriptions, etc.  Some time ago, students wrote a narrative story without any pre-teaching.  We called this the “cold write” story.  This allowed me to see what skills I needed to focus on, and it is allowing us to focus more on how to improve a story through revising and editing.

Math

We’re just finishing up our unit on geometry.  The homework from late last week served as a review for the unit assessment, and I’ve enjoyed working on this unit in class.  We’ll soon start our final unit, which focuses on measurement and data.

Social Studies

A million thanks to you for your donation of a dry erase globe to celebrate teacher appreciation week!  As you may have seen on Twitter last week, we have been working on latitude and longitude, and the globe was a great tool for illustrating this abstract concept!  We also took a few minutes to make you a special thank you video, as you may have seen online.

Thank you so much, families, for our new dry erase globe!What a terrific teacher appreciation gift!We’ve had fun using it to learn about latitude and longitude! #AskYourKid about CT’s coordinates. We also enjoyed making a stop motion animation to show some of our work! 333frames! pic.twitter.com/QYhrfsGEJf

— Jon Moss (@MossTeaches) May 24, 2019

Science

We’ve been learning about plants and animals in class.  The bulk of our study has focused on how animals use their senses to survive.  Students learned about sensory processing by experimenting on how they perceive sensory input, and they extended their learning by working with mealworks.  We learned about how otters stay warm in icy cold waters, and students worked to build their own insulated containers (based on how otters use a later of air to stay warm).  In the coming days, we’ll shift to learning about how plants also have specific parts that are needed in order to survive.

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss