Newsletter 3-4-15

Hello 2D Families! I hope you had a wonderful weekend! This last week was so fun and a great start back from vacation. We started many new units and had so much fun launching them.

Science

This week started off with a visit form the Museum of Science. We watched an informational show on the States of Matter. It was a great way to start our week and show off our knowledge about matter. We also got to watch many interesting experiments with liquid nitrogen and even some with fire! The students loved this and were able to take some great experiences back to the classroom! A dragonfly from 2D even got to participate up on stage! Mr. Saltus also came into our room to run an experiment on gas. We learned that fire needs oxygen to keep the flame burning and we also spent time sketching our observations. We are continuing this experiment next week. 

Reading

We started our Fairy Tale Unit this week. Thank you for getting all of the fairy tale preferences back to me for the wax museum. We have begun exploring fairy tales in the classroom and looking closely at the characters. The students have enjoyed going to the "fairytale club" during reading time to explore different fairy tales so we can build our knowledge. We have also focused on looking closely at our goals during conferencing time and making sure that we are working toward them during independent reading time.

Writing

We started our persuasive writing unit and the students have loved launching this! To start, students created skits trying to sell silly objects that they were given on an index card. Some of these included- a pet frog, grapes, dog food and tacos! The students did so well with this and it is clear that they love trying to persuade others already! We then looked at how authors use their writing to persuade readers. We practiced by writing to persuade others to like our favorite food. The students did so well with this!

Math

We have started Unit 6 in math and we spent time creating and interpreting data and then putting it into bar graphs. We used the graphs that we made and answered questions. It is important for us to spend time on reading graphs and answering questions because it truly shows our understanding. We then looked at new diagrams for subtraction. We also spent time working on addition with carrying over. The students loved math this week and were so eager to try challenges. 

Dragonfly News

Thank you for supporting me in the Staff Vs. Fifth Grade Basketball Game! It was so fun and it meant so much to see some dragonflies sitting in the audience. We had a mystery reader this week and the students did such a great job solving the clues! We can't wait for more mystery readers to come in!