Take a Peek at Our Week!

This week, we worked on our next stop, notice, & note strategy, tough questions. When a character asks themselves a tough question, we ask ourselves what it makes us wonder or what it tells us about the character (personality, traits). We used the books Fly Away Home and Bully to practice and discussed the tough questions in partners. In reading groups, we worked on summarizing articles about people who have faced adversity. This ties into our statement of inquiry for the planner-Authors use multiple genres to convey how identity is shaped by challenges. We will continue to read about individuals who have faced adversity next week and move on to our next notice and note strategy, "again & again".

Our annotating during lang & lit is coming along nicely! Students are really showing their thinking as they read! This helps us to answer questions and to discuss the text. 

We carried over our work in reading groups to writing this week and practiced writing summaries. Students read a short story with a partner, and pulled out the important information using our "somebody, wanted, but, so, then" organizer. Students then independently took the information from the organizer to construct their summaries. 

In individuals & society, we discussed research strategies. Research is our ATL (approaches to learning) focus for our early civilizations planner so we will be discussing how to effectively and responsibly find information for our work. Students also selected which civilization they will become and expert on (Maya, Aztec, Inca). Our next step is to jump into researching the culture of our expert civilizations!! 

WIN time is in full swing! Ask your child what they are working on during their groups. My group is doing a novel study and I'm lucky enough to have a few students from my homeroom joining the fun! What a great time to work with other students in the grade level! 

Reminders: 

*October 31st is an early dismissal day for students. 

*We will not be wearing costumes on Halloween. However, we will be having a Halloween themed breakfast and watching a movie that day! Thank you to all parents who signed up to send in a breakfast treat. :-) 

*Please check your conference date and time! We enjoyed our conferences this week and look forward to meeting with everyone else in the near future! 

 Have a great weekend!
~Mrs. Carr