A Spooktacular Week in Room 102

The last few weeks have been full of fall, writing, and hard work. We began wrapping up our narrative unit last week by beginning our last element of the unit, which is the engaging learning experience (ELE). Our ELE included three tasks: a pumpkin investigation, writing a class book, and publishing personal narratives about a fall experience that we can share with other classes and our families. Together we had fun learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin and making estimations about our pumpkin's height, weight, and circumference. After making predictions we made our pumpkin into a Jack-o-lantern and then we ate pumpkin pie. We used this fun experience to write a class narrative. After that, each student wrote their own narrative about a fall experience. This past week we worked on editing our rough drafts, and today we completed our final drafts and illustrations to our stories. Our book gets sent to be published on Tuesday! I look forward to seeing the finished project, as do the kids. This learning experience was a memorable one, and the kids really enjoyed getting to put what they have learned over the last nine weeks into practice. The kids were excited to write because this activity had meaning, and they felt as though they were really authors sharing their experiences, which is what reading and writing is all about.  The books take about 20 days to be published but they might be here sooner. I am hoping to get them by Thanksgiving break. I know the kids are anxious to share them with their families and friends.

  

      

In addition to completing working on narratives, we have also been reviewing this week sequence of events and comparing and contrasting. We read There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves and There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat. We compared and contrasted the two stories and practiced putting the things that were swallowed back in order. We also made up our own sequence of items that the old lady swallowed through a writing activity and then shared our made up version with each other. Throughout the week we did various long e activities which included a class sort, scavenger hunt, sentence writing, and long e tree. We also went over our narrative post test together and talked about the answers. This was very beneficial for the students. 

 

In math, we finished our subtraction unit today. We began our week by reviewing fact families and completing a fact family scavenger hunt, and then we reviewed subtraction word problems. We also did some mixed fact practice and word problems. I was hoping to get another subtraction timed test in this week, but we just weren't able to get one in. We will take one on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday next week. If your child received multiplication flashcards they will begin taking a timed test over those facts next week instead of subtraction. Next week we will begin exploring shapes as well as partitioning shapes.