2nd/3rd: Week of Mar 25

Math –

Ms. Andrea’s math group reviewed geometry vocabulary, 3D shape attributes and played with fractions! We wrapped up our geometry unit by learning about perimeter. We also took our Unit 6 test and our Unit 7 pre-assessment. SO excited to move on to money!

Ms. Kelly’s math group jumped right back into our multi step word problem warm up before delving into using the distributive property to find the area of a rectangle. The distributive property states that you can break apart a factor into addends and multiply each addend by the other factor to get a product. So, for example, if you had a 12×6 inch rectangle and you wanted to find the area, it could be easier to multiply 10×6 and then 2×6 and add the two products together rather than multiplying 12×6. To make it more concrete, we built an area model (13×4) with tiles and used our distributive property knowledge to physically break it up into more friendly numbers (10×4)+(3×4). Then we could easily find the total area using mental math! THIS is the beauty of the distributive property! And of course when we were finished with our daily work, we pulled out our multiplication and division fluency packets!

Literacy –

New quarter, new book club books! Kiddos are also working hard with short vs. long vowels, more r-controlled vowel practice, and homophones during our reading block.

For our first couple of weeks back during writing time, we are doing some behind the scenes work, and giving a little more explicit instruction on some practices to make our writing stronger. This week we focused on vocal verbs- alternative words to use instead of SAID. Practicing vocal verbs encourages vocabulary building while making a sentence more descriptive, effective, and impactful. Learning and practicing some new techniques now will make our fairytale writing better later! We worked alongside our partners creating dialog using words instead of ‘said’ and shared our results for inspiration!

Theme –

In theme this week, we created journals to use for our journey through the medieval times, where we will put ourselves in other people’s shoes along the social ladder, starting at the bottom as peasants. We plan to write about our “experiences” in the weeks ahead. We made our journal cover by crumpling brown paper until it was just the perfect amount of old! Then we looked over a list of medieval surnames. Did you know many surnames were given for the profession that the people held? Or for where they lived? We picked our surname to add to our journal covers. And then it was peep time! The queens of Beta Manor have given simple “wattle and daub” houses to our peasants in return for their servitude. The peasant families were allowed to quickly set up their home, making 1 table, stools for each member and 1 chest for their possessions. There was no time to to dilly-dally, for they needed to begin working in the fields the next morning.

Medieval peasants had it really rough. Waking before dawn, removing rocks and trees from the fields, plowing the fields, planting the crops, harvesting, and giving much of the food to the lords or king, keeping very little for themselves. Their houses were small, dark, dirty and cold in the winter and hot in the summer. They worked all the time. On Thursday, our Peeps planted the fields, knowing they will need to give the majority of the food grown to the queens of Beta Manor. Life is hard. We wrote about our first day in the fields in our journals using the perspective of a peasant.