Math
By: Isabella, Tori, Martina, Jack and Bryce
4K Mathematicians have been learning about adding fractions with the same denominators. Fraction Capture is a fun game that we have been playing with fraction cards that we made ourselves! The game asks us to divide the deck into equal-size piles, and turn them over one-by-one, and compare the fractions. The player with the greater fraction wins that round.
We just took another quiz on fractions. We also work on fraction word problems and work book pages. In our work, we have to prove our answer with a visual representation. We have been learning about equivalent fractions and landmark fractions. We are specifically working in IXL folders P,T, & Q. That’s the math scoop.
Reading
By Zoe, Jackson, Kenny and Maria Clara
In Reading we just finished reading The Life and Times of the Ant. The Essential Question that we worked hard to figure out and support is, “How do living things each have an important role in the world?” We worked hard on our ant projects, where we painted a diagram that shows and explains the importance of our ant’s daily life and work. Be sure to check out our Seesaw updates!
Also, we are taking a break from our Journeys books. Miss Kennedy created a wonderful book club! We got to pick books that interest us, and then she created our book club after that. The purpose of a book club is to read an interesting book and learn from it by talking about it with our friends. People read and share their thoughts about the book they are reading. We are working in our Reading Response Journal that we glued and pasted in a spiral notebook. Some of the focus topics / mini-lessons we (will) learn are about: Making Connections, Asking Questions, Making Predictions and Writing a Summary.
After this, we hope to learn more about reading and learn new things that keep our mind healthy and vigorous.
Social Studies
By Bella & Griffin
In Social Studies, we are continuing to work in the Midwest Region. We are focusing on our home state Illinois. We are starting a project on Illinois. This project will require us to live three connected phases.
Did you know Hillary Clinton was born in Illinois?
Did you know Illinois motto is “State Sovereignty National Union”?
Did you know Illinois is part of the Northwest territory?
Science
by Olivia and Grant
In Science with Ms. McFarlane, we have been working on our Land and Water unit. Now we are designing and building dams in our stream tables to stop the water from flooding our (replica) houses. To help our designs, we had to figure out a way to not let the water flood the houses. Some of the materials we are using are: tree bark, clay, popsicle sticks, duck tape, sand and water. We are going to test them on Tuesday April 24, 2018.
We’ve also been working on packets, sometimes use Brainpop, and a book called, Land and Water. We don’t use them often but it’s good to learn interesting things about Earth's Land and Water.
Writing Workshop
By Alec, Rose, and Hailey
We are continuing in the writing process to develop our Literary Essays. The most recent focus was on writing leads (introductions) and conclusions. We are also defining theme in our stories to analyze and use in our piece. Themes are the message that the authors wants us to learn through the character’s experiences. We also add quotes, as evidence, from the story into our paragraph. For example, in the book The Selfish Crocodile, the author writes, “The mouse crept along the crocodile’s big neck and into his open mouth.” We use a lot of meaningful evidence in each paragraph to prove our thesis. We had to add comparisons, sound effects, dialect, alliteration, repetition and descriptive words and sentences to make our essays more interesting. We looked at characters of our books, and figure out who they are on the inside compared to who they are on the outside, and find out the differences. Writing has been exciting during the past month for us and we are looking forward to publishing!
PARCC Testing
By Aoife and Alex
Testing is over! In PARCC, there were 2 types of tests; English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. There were 7 tests in total: 4 in math and 3 in ELA. In the tests, the response to passages had to be “so easy to understand, that a chimpanzee could get it!” This was our way of making sure that we explained our thinking very clearly, and was a way that Miss K. would encourage us to be thorough. In math you would have some questions to answer and there were more questions in math than in ELA. In the ELA tests you had to read a passage then answer the questions. There would always be at least one response passage to write in each math and reading test.
By: Isabella, Tori, Martina, Jack and Bryce
4K Mathematicians have been learning about adding fractions with the same denominators. Fraction Capture is a fun game that we have been playing with fraction cards that we made ourselves! The game asks us to divide the deck into equal-size piles, and turn them over one-by-one, and compare the fractions. The player with the greater fraction wins that round.
We just took another quiz on fractions. We also work on fraction word problems and work book pages. In our work, we have to prove our answer with a visual representation. We have been learning about equivalent fractions and landmark fractions. We are specifically working in IXL folders P,T, & Q. That’s the math scoop.
Reading
By Zoe, Jackson, Kenny and Maria Clara
In Reading we just finished reading The Life and Times of the Ant. The Essential Question that we worked hard to figure out and support is, “How do living things each have an important role in the world?” We worked hard on our ant projects, where we painted a diagram that shows and explains the importance of our ant’s daily life and work. Be sure to check out our Seesaw updates!
Also, we are taking a break from our Journeys books. Miss Kennedy created a wonderful book club! We got to pick books that interest us, and then she created our book club after that. The purpose of a book club is to read an interesting book and learn from it by talking about it with our friends. People read and share their thoughts about the book they are reading. We are working in our Reading Response Journal that we glued and pasted in a spiral notebook. Some of the focus topics / mini-lessons we (will) learn are about: Making Connections, Asking Questions, Making Predictions and Writing a Summary.
After this, we hope to learn more about reading and learn new things that keep our mind healthy and vigorous.
Social Studies
By Bella & Griffin
In Social Studies, we are continuing to work in the Midwest Region. We are focusing on our home state Illinois. We are starting a project on Illinois. This project will require us to live three connected phases.
- Phase 1 is the Illinois state report, which focuses on facts and important information about our state of Illinois! We are learning all kinds of cool things like: important people, what our state motto is, and what our state flag looks like and why!
- In Phase 2, we will start writing an in-depth essay on Illinois’ important people and events. We will pick a person or event of our choice.
- Phase 3 is when we start to make a creative technology-based presentation to reflect and share out all of the important information we gathered from Phases 1 & 2.
We are excited to be working on these projects and think Illinois is a cool place to live!
Did you know Hillary Clinton was born in Illinois?
Did you know Illinois motto is “State Sovereignty National Union”?
Did you know Illinois is part of the Northwest territory?
Science
by Olivia and Grant
In Science with Ms. McFarlane, we have been working on our Land and Water unit. Now we are designing and building dams in our stream tables to stop the water from flooding our (replica) houses. To help our designs, we had to figure out a way to not let the water flood the houses. Some of the materials we are using are: tree bark, clay, popsicle sticks, duck tape, sand and water. We are going to test them on Tuesday April 24, 2018.
We’ve also been working on packets, sometimes use Brainpop, and a book called, Land and Water. We don’t use them often but it’s good to learn interesting things about Earth's Land and Water.
Writing Workshop
By Alec, Rose, and Hailey
We are continuing in the writing process to develop our Literary Essays. The most recent focus was on writing leads (introductions) and conclusions. We are also defining theme in our stories to analyze and use in our piece. Themes are the message that the authors wants us to learn through the character’s experiences. We also add quotes, as evidence, from the story into our paragraph. For example, in the book The Selfish Crocodile, the author writes, “The mouse crept along the crocodile’s big neck and into his open mouth.” We use a lot of meaningful evidence in each paragraph to prove our thesis. We had to add comparisons, sound effects, dialect, alliteration, repetition and descriptive words and sentences to make our essays more interesting. We looked at characters of our books, and figure out who they are on the inside compared to who they are on the outside, and find out the differences. Writing has been exciting during the past month for us and we are looking forward to publishing!
PARCC Testing
By Aoife and Alex
Testing is over! In PARCC, there were 2 types of tests; English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. There were 7 tests in total: 4 in math and 3 in ELA. In the tests, the response to passages had to be “so easy to understand, that a chimpanzee could get it!” This was our way of making sure that we explained our thinking very clearly, and was a way that Miss K. would encourage us to be thorough. In math you would have some questions to answer and there were more questions in math than in ELA. In the ELA tests you had to read a passage then answer the questions. There would always be at least one response passage to write in each math and reading test.