May 2nd

Writing:

We have been working on contractions and dialogue in our writing this week. 

The students made a list of all of the contractions they could think of, and then we worked through breaking them up into their parts (isn't= is not; you're= you are). The students then made contraction caterpillars.

Next, we looked through books for dialogue to see how the author let us know that a person was talking. We looked at when to include quotation marks and also checked out what other special punctuation needed to be included in writing dialogue. There are lots of rules involved, so the kids did wonderful for their first experience writing dialogue!

The then wrote sentences using their dialogue AND the contractions they came up with and we added those to our caterpillars. 

Reading

We spent this week researching extinct and endangered animals. The kids will be making posters to share their learning. 

We also spent some time this week focused on author's message. We learned that this is the lesson that the author is trying to teach us in their book. While not all books have an author's message, many of the picture books we read do! We worked with four questions to help us find author's message: 

-What was the characters problem?

-What did the character do about their problem?

-What did the character learn?

-What did I learn?

Math

We worked on multiplication and division this week. We did a LOT of drawing of models to help us understand. I think the kids really grasped multiplication, we're going to continue working on the tricky concept of division. :)

Fun Stuff!

As part of May Day and "Inspire Ankeny" we made May Day baskets for our 5th grade buddies! The kids loved making cards, filling the baskets, and sneaking in to deliver the baskets while our buddies were out at specials. : ) What a fun way to spend a morning!