December
Reading and Writing Unit on Comparing and Contrasting: Focus: Give the students background knowledge to support them in writing an opinion/contrasting piece of writing with an emphasis on supporting their opinions with examples/evidence from the reading (text). This unit began in November as students were immersed in several Cinderella stories from different cultures from around the world. During this immersion, the stories read aloud were compared and contrasted on a process grid.
As we moved into December, I presented a pictorial input chart comparing and contrasting only two of the previous read Cinderella versions. This was a collaborative effort between myself and the students. As students began to understand the process, they helped to create the notes recorded under the different headings on the pictorial input chart. (GLAD strategy)
This then lead to transferring the information from the pictorial input chart to a venn diagram. This was done through a gradual release of responsibility model, I do, we do, you do. First, "I do" ( I show them explicitly), then "we do" (the students and I do some of the work together), followed by "you do" (the students either do the work by themselves or with a partner).
During the last two weeks before vacation, the students were presented lessons on how to write an opinion paragraph comparing two Cinderella stories. I wrote my own paragraph as a mentor text for the students to follow and use for support. The following is a list of some of those lessons: opinion topic sentence, language of "contrasting" statements (On the other hand...), and stating an opinion and backing it up with evidence from the text.
Math, Multiplication: Our work in multiplication has been focused on multiplication patterns, arrays, things that come in groups, partial products, and academic language such as "twice" and "3 times as many as 4".
Math, Geometry: We finished our unit on geometry. There was a lot of language for the students to remember. Vacabulary definitions such as; line, line segment, naming angles, polygons, naming triangles by their sides and by their angles, naming quadrilatrerals and how to describe them. This photo is an example of the polygon art project we completed with this unit. The students had to first describe all the polygons and count how many they could find, before cutting the project into its individual puzzle pieces to make the tree.
Math, Perimeter: We begin a unit on Perimeter and Area. The students always have a difficult time understanding how to calculate these. We focused on "Perimeter" before vacation. When we return from vacation we will review "Perimeter" and learn about "Area".