Writing This Week - Start Smart

We are finishing Start Smart this week. This unit has introduced the students to the structure of Writing this year and provided steps and strategies the students will use this year in Writing. We reviewed editing and revising and discussed the marks we'll use when we improve our writing. We also looked at several prompts that represent the prompts the students will write on throughout the year. This week they are writing about a neighborhood littered with trash and what they will do to solve the problem. They will read and analyze the prompt, organize their thoughts and respond in their Writer's Notebook. They'll edit and revise their work and have a conference with their teacher. This will match a typical week when we'll be writing to prompt and working on different writing skills. I have provided a link on my teacher page to the resources we've used this week. It will be up by the end of the week.

Reading This Week - Start Smart

This will be our final week of Start Smart. Start Smart is a unit in our Treasures book that introduces the format of our new reading program. It is important that the students get practice with the strategies and skills that they'll be expected to use throughout the year as we read a variety of texts. This week we are working on reading expository texts. Nonfiction will be used throughout the year and it's important that the students know how to use title, headings, pictures and graphics to enhance their understanding of what they read. The students will review five text structures that students will use as they summarize different texts. These can be found in their purple Start Smart books. We will also be reviewing reading strategies that will be a crucial part of what we focus on throughout the year. The students have used these in the past, but we will go over them again and discuss how they are used in our new reading series. Everything that we have gone over can be found on my teacher page. I've attached the files that we used while we were going over this information in class. This link will provide a good explanation of the strategies and skills that the students will use throughout the year.

Math This Week - September 6 - 9, 2011

Last week we spent several days looking through our Student Reference Book. It's a very important resource that I want the students to use throughout this year. We also started looking at rectangular arrays. Arrays are a great way to show multiplication, factors and products. This week we are continuing our unit on factors. On Tuesday, we connected arrays to factors and products. We used these arrays to find factor pairs and all of the factors of a number. Factor rainbows are a great method of finding all the factors of a number. Look for definitions and examples in their Math spiral. We will continue working with factors as we play the "Factor Captor Game." This can be found on page 271 in their Student Reference Book and can be played at home. I will provide game boards to students who would like to play this game with you at home. Look definitions and examples of even number, odd number, and remainder in their Math spiral. We will finish the week by looking at divisibility. The students will learn methods to find which numbers are divisible by another number. These can be found on page 13 in their Math Journal. This is a great lesson to improve their multiplication and division recall. Multiplication recall is a skill that we will be focusing on for the next few weeks. It's increasingly important that they are able to quickly recall multiplication facts. It will help them in many facets of multiplication. We are currently taking multiplication practice tests to see where each students needs improvement.