Welcome To Mrs. Johnson's Classroom Website: News You Can Use!

Literacy

Treasures:

This week, the children worked with r controlled vowels (or). The children read stories about determination. The characters in the stories wanted to achieve something and they kept trying until they were successful. The children worked with making inferences. They used their prior knowledge (schema) and clues from the text to help them make inferences about the characters.

Grammar Packets:

This week, the children revisited adjectives. They learned that some adjectives are words for numbers. The children also worked with proper nouns. They had to select the correct day of the week to finish each sentence (the one that started with a capital letter).

Writing:

This week, we continued our persuasive writing unit. The children used their graphic organizer from last week to write their persuasive letter. They made sure to include the correct parts of a letter (heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature).

On Wednesday, they met with a partner and took turns reading their letter to one another. They helped each other to check for an opening opinion, three strong reasons to support their opinion, and a closing opinion. They will write their final draft next week and I will deliver them to the appropriate staff members. We are hoping to receive some responses to our letters.

Math

In Math, we completed unit 8. The children worked with counting equal parts of a whole. They identified shapes divided into halves, thirds, and fourths. The children labeled the equal parts with the correct fractions. They also worked with dividing pennies equally between different numbers of people. The children worked with finding fractional parts of sets. To review some of the concepts from this unit, the children moved through different explorations: making change, telling time, working with base-10 blocks, counting money, and fact practice. On Monday, the children will use Mimio Vote to review before they take their unit 8 assessment on Tuesday.

Science

This week, the scientists continued their exploration of Weather. The scientists continued to explore the idea that water can be part of the air. They watched as water condensed out of the air and formed droplets on a cold surface.

On Wednesday, the scientists learned about dew and frost. They learned that liquid water droplets that condense out of the air during the night are called dew. The scientists learned that ice crystals that cover a cold surface when water comes out of the air are called frost.

On Friday, the scientists investigated some properties of air. They observed a demonstration of how air fills the “empty” space in a bottle. Then they experimented with air trapped inside different objects and plastic bags. They learned that the layer of air that covers the entire earth is called the atmosphere.

Jennifer Ward Author Visit

On Tuesday, author Jennifer Ward came to Dryden school. She gave a wonderful presentation to the children. Mrs. Ward talked about her journey to become an author. She shared beautiful photos and how she comes up with all her different book ideas. Mrs. Ward also had the children help her read one of her stories, There Was An Old Pirate Who Swallowed A Fish. The children enjoyed her visit and were very excited to try and write their own book about, There Was A Dolphin Who Swallowed...

You can learn more about Mrs. Ward by going to her website: http://www.jenniferwardbooks.com/index.html

Earth Day

This week, the children worked some Earth Day activities. They listened to the story, The Wump World. After listening to the story, the children worked together to sequence the events of the story using sentence stripes. Then the children each illustrated their own retelling of the story including their favorite part.

Earth Day Acrostic Poems:

On Friday, the children wrote an acrostic poem using the words, Earth Day. The children brainstormed different words and phrases to go with each letter. They chose their favorite word/phrase for each letter and created their acrostic poem. They completed the activity with a photo of themselves holding a construction paper Earth.