Hump day!

We made it through the hump of the week! Today was pretty productive. I've got this cough and my voice is starting to creak and crack...hopefully, I'll keep it through the week... Today, with our numbers of the week, we generated number patterns using ten terms and wrote their rules. (We also discussed what the words generate and terms mean.) The editing, revising, writing, etc. tool we learned about today was the Thesaurus. We generated :) a list of words and students are playing Thesaurus Roll-a-Word to work with using this tool. We came to a troubling part of The Giver today and your child might discuss it with you tonight. They talk about Release all the time for "bad" people, the Old and Newchildren that just aren't "fitting in" with the Community, throughout the book. Some inferred this to mean death while others did not. Well, today, we found out that when the Community members Release someone, they put them to death. We talked about this book being fantasy and science fiction and what that means. We also talked about how that is only what they know as a Community and we are like Jonas and the Giver because we feel things so that feels wrong to us. I became the Giver today, though, and gave them all a nice memory to leave Read Aloud with--that we have some great things coming up next week! In Reader's Workshop, I worked with some reading a fictional story about Hanukkah, where we needed to consult an informational text too to help us understand the fictional story more. I also worked with some others with a poem about Hanukkah where we also needed to use informational text, along with context clues, to figure out some unknown words. After recess, we worked with guess what... fractions! We used our fraction strips to find equivalent fractions as well as to compare fractions. We also played Fraction Blackjack and shared how we grew in our game play from yesterday. We really enjoyed independent math time today, though! (Hmmm...I don't think anyone worked with fractions...:)) Our day ended with finishing up learning about the Mound Builders.