Mr. Reed's Website: Thursday, January 7th

In readers' workshop, we are continuing our work with close reading. Today we learned that readers need to pay close attention to the point in a story where the character's actions or thoughts clearly contradicts previous patterns. Often this suggests a change or new insight into the character. We used the story "Your Questions for Author here" for this new work.

In writers' workshop, your child is learning more about opinion writing by focusing on reasons. Now that students are writing stronger claims/position statements, we moved forward by thinking and writing about reasons to validate our positions. Students are going to learn more about this tomorrow as well.

During math, students are ordering decimals up to the thousandths place. They played a math game called Decimal Top-it; it can be found on this website .

In science, students are working together in a ramp investigation. By placing a ball bearing at different spots on a ruler, students are noticing that the ball travels different lengths. They are recording this information in their science notebook. Then at then end of class, they are using their data to make the ball travel a mystery distance that I give them. Today students were trying to get the ball to travel 72.5 cm. By using their data, they have one opportunity to hit the mystery number. Many groups were very close or right on the number.