TGIFriday, January 4

In Math today, we played some fraction games in the computer lab. We went through eSchool to get to Illuminations to play Equivalent Fractions, Fraction Models and Fraction Game. They really liked the last one. If you would like to try any of them out, you can access them by going to illuminations.nctm.org. From looking over the assessments a few times, I feel that they mostly understand the basic concepts of fractions but lack the application and problem solving so I also had them working on these skills through some problem solving worksheets. We will continue this work next week too. We finished our Year in Pictures during Reader's Workshop and met for Literature Circles with book groups. They are reading fictional chapter books and kind of in charge of how much they read and what they are discussing. These books are at their INSTRUCTIONAL level therefore they may need some help with understanding certain words, concepts or situations. In Writing, we reviewed our previous Word Study generalizations and focused on the patterns and generalizations using Rainbow Spelling. Anytime we can use crayons is great! Knowing these generalizations is important as they are going to be held more responsible for using them in their writing. After discussing weathering and erosion yesterday and again today in Science, we imitated this process using soil, sugar and sugar cubes. Students did a great job with distinguishing between the two terms. They also were able to make the connection of imitating the processes because the processes actually take years and years.