September 27th

Our Lead21 unit this week was focused on different roles in our community. We are also learning about rural, suburban, and urban communities and how they have changed over the years. It worked out wonderfully that we could have a speaker from the Ankeny Historical Society come and talk with us about how Ankeny has changed.

We learned that Ankeny was founded by John and Sarah Ankeny, that there was only one elementary school when our speaker was growing up, and that we used to have a fireworks factory.

Our guest speaker from the Ankeny  Historical Society

 Another focus in reading was making inferences. An inference is when we use our schema (what we already know) and clues from text to help us learn something that the author didn't explain in the story.

To introduce it I brought in a bag of my stuff and the kids had to look through my things and make inferences about me.

I think the kids favorite thing this week was using computers to research our inquiry questions. We learned how to use a couple research sites (Searchasaurus and Google Safesearch) to look up questions. We also talked about taking notes (not just copying) and that the Internet is not always the best place to find our answers (they also wrote interviews and looked in books). Next week we will be taking our research and creating posters of their learning. 

In writing we were researching ways that author's start their stories. We found that many stories start with a description of the setting or characters, a question, or Once Upon a Time. Students used these to start writing their own fiction stories. 

Working on their fiction stories

Looking for story starts

 In math we worked hard on fact families this week. If you still have the fact triangles from Back to School Night (or if you have the ones I sent home with your child) these are great practice for quick facts. 

We will be taking a test next week on fact families, and will move onto a new topic next week. This doesn't mean we'll leave addition and subtraction facts in the past! Many of the games that students play are focused on adding and subtracting so they get practice every day.