Beautiful weather, fabulous fall!
This week our learners have been hard at work using nonfiction signposts with our social studies text. We've been looking at it with a questioning stance, and coming up with BIG questions. As Rowan put it so wisely, "How does this affect our classroom? How is it changing what I am learning?" She's already internalized what we are all developing in ourselves as readers -- read widely, and know that there are many, many different versions to actively consider to understand a subject deeply. We are discovering things about the Native American tribes here in Texas, and how they lived/adapted to each region of Texas.
In ELA, we continue our journey with Alex in Eleven. We are really taking steps to further grasp the theme of each and every chapter, and how those synthesize to become an overall author's purpose and overall theme. We use our text every week to explore multi meaning vocabulary, sentence structure, and as a base for our writing as well.
On Tuesday, we had an amazing field trip to Zach Scott Theater to experience "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." It was a theater-in-the-round experience where two actors played all the roles. Here's a glimpse!
 |
| Kynnadi helping with a bit of magic! |
 |
| Hamming it up before the show |
 |
| Eager and waiting! |
 |
| It's .a bit bright outside... |
 |
| Lunch at Pease Park |
In math, everyone refreshed their multidigit subtraction understanding. When using a place value strategy, we discovered that there are really two opportunities to check accuracy with regrouping. We need to verify that our regrouping (how we "decomposed" the number representing our whole group) still has the same value as the original whole number. Our use of expanded form really helped as we checked for accuracy there. Then we used addition to check our subtraction in each column. Using these two strategies slowly and carefully has been helpful for every SBLC mathematician this week.
We wrapped up energy stations early in the week and then took a break from physics to try our hand at ornithology. Our current class pet is a sweet "budgie" and we're observing, questioning, and researching to learn more about him. So far we've discovered some interesting adaptations, his native habitat, his diet, and his life cycle. Your curious scientists have a wealth of questions to explore, so we'll see how many we can tackle before he journeys to another classroom next week.
Enjoy the weekend!
Jen and Jewellyn
Comments
Post a Comment