I so enjoyed meeting many of you at Go To School Night! Although this past week was shortened, we were still able to pack a lot in. Most of our procedures and routines are in place and as the students are getting used to them, we are getting down to business! We do, however, continue to spend time team building and creating a positive space because if you like where you are, you will try harder.
In reading, we began our unit study of story vocabulary and characters in realistic fiction. To understand a character's traits, we look at their WALT - words, actions, looks, and thoughts. Just like people, we make first impressions of characters, but we should expect for them to be complex and have more than one trait. We also looked at how the setting (both time and place) affects characters. We are creating character theory charts and seeing how the character evolves over the course of the plot.
Our root of the week was ology - "the study of." This root tied in perfectly to kick off archaeology and the process used in understanding civilizations from the past. They discovered that archaeologists study artifacts to understand how people from the past once lived. They examined some ancient artifacts from my basement and made conclusions as to what they were and why their function. They also went to a dig site (a paper towel) and excavated artifacts (chocolate chips) that were covered by ages of sand (cookies) by using special archaeological tools (toothpicks). They realized that they needed to be careful and that there may be items that you don't see on the surface. The more we compared our findings to classmates, the more accurate our assumptions became about how many chips are in a chocolate chip cookie.
We will have a short again next week with Monday's holiday and MAP testing on Wednesday and Thursday.
Enjoy the weekend and remind your child to read!
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