Wonderful Wednesday - PRACTICE Lockdown Drills

This morning, the students completed the Wednesday section of their vocabulary sheet for our word of the week, assume.  Then, they played a word game, using the parts of speech, similar to Mad Libs, online.  After the announcements, we reviewed the procedure for our lockdown drills and switched for math.

We began math with an addition brain teaser warm up and then reviewed last night's homework.  Then we participated in our lockdown drills.  The students did a super great job!  After that, we began our rotations.

During the small group instruction we practiced predicting how many digits would be in the answer to a multi-digit subtraction problem.  Then we  estimated the difference, to determine if our answer was reasonable.  Finally, we found the difference, using the standard algorithm for subtraction.  During math with a partner, the students played a game involving squares and the addition of multi-digit numbers with a sum of 1,000,000.  Finally, during the technology rotation, the children completed a session of Xtra math and then played Jeopardy or Drag and Drop math.

Math HOMEWORK is posted on Google Classroom.

In between our second and third rotations, the children enjoyed lunch and outdoor recess.

After math, we began our literacy block.  Today the students took a formative covering identifying the theme of text and comparing the themes of two texts.  After they finished, they had time to catch up on the unfinished assignments from earlier in the week.  These included, writing about the theme in "Claudine's Tack Attack", identifying and explaining two similes/metaphors from Pop's Bridge, and writing about a human-made landmark in Maryland.

I did not meet with reading groups to ensure they had time to focus on the formative and catch up on unfinished tasks.

After reading, we ate snack and read Wonder.  Then we began our writing lesson.

First we read and discussed some non-fiction poems, about desert animals,  written in first person, as if the animal was talking.  Then, the students worked with their writing partners to write  "I" sentences for an animal of their choosing.  Finally, they chose an animal, and wrote as many "I" sentences as they could, in 5 minutes, for this animal.  After sharing, we began another writing lesson, because we are WAY behind.  :-)

During our second writing lesson, we read another form of non-fiction text about animals.  We spent some time discussing the differences between the two texts.  This one was a question and answer format, and was written from the author's point of view.  After that, the students had 15 minutes of silent writing time to begin a topic list for non-fiction writing, work on any pieces they had already started, and/or begin a new piece.

We ended the day with a science lesson.  We observed pictures, read non-fiction text, and watched a video to determine the needs of plants, their parts, and the job of each part.

HOMEWORK:  Math is posted on GC- Math.  Read for 20 minutes.