The Jungle Journal for the Week of 10/14/13

Readers’ Workshop

This week we continue our exploration of characters.  We will be recognizing how our personal experiences can help us understand and relate to characters on a deeper level.  It is important that students are not making superficial connections like “I have a dog, too,” or, “I’ve been to Texas, too.”  In this unit we are pushing students to recall a time when they have experienced a similar situation in order to draw upon their emotional memories.  This emotional connection to characters is what will help students empathize and connect to the text.  Student connections may begin, “This reminds me of…” and should transition into, “This makes me realize…(something about the character’s thoughts/feelings/motivations).”

Last Friday, students were given their first Brain Builder.  Each Friday from now on, students will be given a brief comprehension passage, or Brain Builder.  If students complete this passage carefully and demonstrate strategy use reviewed in class, they can earn Monkey Moolah.

Writers’ Workshop

Students will be writing a fictional story that explains an illustration in the book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.  After choosing the illustration they want to write about, students will learn how to use a planning tool called a story mountain.  The shape of the tool encourages rising and falling action to become a natural part of the story, with a main problem at the peak.  Look for more info on the blog!

Skills

Students should study and complete one of the homework options for list 6.  Our quiz will be Friday. The quiz will also cover our skills topic of the week, irregular past tense verbs.  Our daily skills sheet (in their ROAR folder) will serve as their study guide.  Please note that skills tests will now assess the current skill, as well as any past skills.  Skills addressed so far include

• Sentences vs. fragments
• Singular vs. plural nouns
• Possessive nouns
• Action verbs
• Past, present, future tense verbs 

Math

Our Unit 3 End of Unit Assessment is scheduled for Tuesday, October 15^th.  The topics covered during this unit include understanding place value, addition strategies, subtraction strategies, and being able to identify an equation to match a story problem.  Your child can review any of the sheets in Unit 3 of their Math workbook or yellow packet found in their ROAR folder to prepare.  Our next unit, beginning Wednesday, will focus on objects that come in groups, skip counting, and arrays to build an understanding of multiplication and division.  

Science

We are studying the three states of matter, solid, liquid, and gas.  We will recognize that water melts, freezes, boils, evaporates, and condenses.  Try this fun and easy at home lab:  Get two cups.  Fill each cup with the same amount of water.  Mark the water level.  Put one cup in the freezer.  Put the other cup on a shelf.  Observe what happens to the level of water in each cup after 12 hours.  If your child writes a short summary of what happened (or you can email us pictures!), they will earn Monkey Moolah.   

Social Studies

We are discussing the continents and oceans on our world map.  The quiz on Friday, October 18^th will cover two weeks of material, including last week's map skills.