March 6-10, 2017

This week we focused on the French digraph "in" and its variations, "im" and "ain." The students practised writing a shorter text than last week, just 3 sentences. On Friday they wrote the sentences with many words available on the word wall, and with a partner. Afterwards they corrected their writing in coloured pencil, which has them practising the skill of editing.

The students also read and worked with a comptine using many "in" words, underlining the sound, filling in blanks, and putting the lines into order. 

In writer's workshop, I introduced an editing checklist to support the students through the steps of editing. Several students are taking the next step of conferencing with me and then producing a good copy of a chosen text. Some good copies are stories on a single page for inclusion in the class book, some are stand alone books in the same format as the A-Z books. These will be available for other students to read during reading time. 

In math, we worked on the vocabulary words for describing the position of things (under, over, beside...). We will be applying this vocabulary as we explore more spatial challenges in geometry. Here is a link to the song we sang with some of these words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npniUd2M_vI

The week was dominated by the work around our structures projects. Having planned the structures last week, the kids built them again using fasteners like white glue and hot glue to make them permanent. In their plan, each student had sketched their structure, named it, and identified the goal of the structure (to contain, to support, or to span). Before the building began, I asked them to take 3 photos as they worked, to show the beginning, the middle and the end of their construction. 

Once the building phase was done and the 3 photos were taken, the kids had 2 jobs to complete: to fill in the rest of their planning sheet with a list of the materials they had used, the properties of those materials, and the fasteners they had used; and to add 1 sentence to each of their 3 photos using an app called Skitch. Both projects required a lot of initiative and risk-taking on the part of the students. I provided a template for the 3 sentences for the Skitch project to help them write, for example, "At the beginning I put the wood on the base. In the middle I put the cardboard beside the wood. At the end I put the plastic on the cardboard."

Some students managed to finish both tasks, but most students will return to the projects after March break.