October 28, 2016

Hello Families, 

Playing Government Concentration

As you can imagine, our room is buzzing with excitement as it is Friday and our class harvest party was today. Thank you to our room parents for organizing this fun event! This week in writing, we have been busy working our Halloween Narrative stories!  This has been a month long assignment, as students have worked to use their narrative diamonds to help organize their thoughts while adding elaborative detail and dialogue to their stories.  Most recently, students learned to edit and revise their writing, a very important skill that we will apply to our daily work as well.  Today, students worked on constructing their elaborative detail paragraph by focusing on including sensory details.  This has been an exciting piece of writing that every student has enjoyed and been proud of, especially since it is centered around Halloween!  In Social Studies, we are wrapping up learning about our government and will begin exploring our first region, the Northeast, next week.  Students have been accessing our quizlet account to help them study, which is always a useful resource.   As a reminder, the login name is Wentworth SS, and the password is hinghamschools.  In Science, students have finalized their month long Botany unit by presenting their beautiful bee and flower projects.  They look fantastic, and students have been demonstrating a great understanding of pollination.  

Brainstorming Sensory Details

 In reading, students have been learning “fix up” strategies to help them monitor comprehension in both fiction and non-fiction.  Our TRI groups are now in full swing and students have adjusted to their groups nicely.  We are continuing to apply “tracks” to our reading, which have encouraged students to think beyond the text.  This strategy is one that they can apply to their reading at home, and I’m sure they would be excited to share this with you! This week, I also sent home your child’s first RACE response.  This stands for restate, answer, cite, and evaluate.  This was done independently, so I could assess areas of strength and specific skills to continue working on.  The ability to pull evidence from the text is difficult, and this was the first reading response our class has done independently.  We will continue practicing this throughout the year. In math, we have finished our second unit, and are in the process of being assessed on this content.   So far, we have learned about the difference between factors and multiples, have found the area of rectangles, and identified square numbers.  We have also explored various applications for multiplication, and have classified shapes!  Thank you for working with your children on their multiplication facts, building fact fluency is so important.

In other classroom news, 4W  is greatful to be using Yoga4classrooms this year!  This program is a fun and effective tool to promote a positive, peaceful, learning ready classroom!  All activities have students moving around and completing brain boosting movements  to promote wellness and character building.  So far, it's been a big success!! As a reminder, next Wednesday will be an early release due to conferences.  I look forward to speaking with some of you about our year thus far.  If you cannot make that conference date and time, please feel free to email me, and we can set up another day that works best! Thank you for reading about our classroom, and enjoy our pictures from this week!

Best,

Ms. Wentworth :)

Upcoming Dates/Events

Conference/Half Day: November 2nd

Picture Retake Day: November 4th * We will re-take our whole class picture!

No School: November 11

Book Report due: November 14

Questions For Conversation 

• What are the editing steps you use in writing?
• When writing your elaborative paragraph, what sensory details did you use?
• What does RACE stand for?
• Can you tell me the three branches of government? What are their roles?

Talk about Creativity! 

Our adorable Craft!

Identifying "Red Flag" Words