Lessons Learned Nov 15 - 23

We are back after a nice long Thanksgiving break. We hope everyone enjoyed their holiday!

The last two weeks we have been working on...

Reading:
We finished up our story A Very Important Day and moved into our current theme's genre focus plays. During our center rotations we work with reader's theater short script plays frequently. Also, in our textbook we have been reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. In addition to working with plays, we have also been studying the focus skill compare and contrast.

Writing:
To go along with our study of plays, in writing we have been focussing on adding dialogue into our narrative stories. We have spent a lot of time working with mature vocabulary to replace said, because "said is dead" and is no longer welcome in our writing. We have also spent a lot of time practicing the correct format for writing the dialogue we want to include.

Dialogue Format:

( .) Imperative or declarative sentences:
" Put what the person is saying in the quotation marks - don't forget a capital letter," said word person who said the quote add some detail .
Example:
"Push in your chair when you get up," stated Ms. Cribb with a soft but serious tone.

(?) Interrogative Sentences:
"Put what the person is asking in the quotation marks - don't forget a capital letter?"  said word person who asked the question add some detail.
Example:
"Did you enjoy the field trip to the Cummer Museum?" questioned Jayla as she stepped off the bus.

(!) Exclamatory Sentences:
"Put what the the person is saying in quotation marks - don't forget a capital letter!" said word person who said the quote add some detail .
Example:
"Help!" screamed the little girl as the dog chased her down the street.

During the time we spent working on dialogue Mrs. Bridges also took us to the computer lab and we learned how to make PowerPoint slideshows. We used PowerPoint to create dialogue story slideshows.

Math:
We have been working on equivalent fractions the last two weeks in math.

Science:

We just completed a mini unit working with magnets.

Social Studies:

Recently Ms. Cribb taught a wonderful lesson on the first people of Florida. The lesson followed along with Chapter 2 in our social studies textbook. As a class we created a Florida Flipbook. Working in small groups, each group designed a book page about a particular tribe of Native Americans in Florida.

In social studies we have also started working in Chapter 3 of our textbook, studying European settlers coming to Florida.