What a week!  Between spring pictures, Valentines parties,  and our upcoming Dance, there’s been a lot to celebrate as we approach the end of the second trimester.  Reminder: there is no school tomorrow or Monday. Enjoy the long weekend! This week, we accomplished some key things in the classroom:

Reading: Students had their final meetings for their 2nd trimester book clubs. Mixed feelings were expressed – many loved their book so much they wished it didn’t end.  Others had some critiques, and are ready to move on.  Either way, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and choose some new novels!

Writing: We discussed how poetry can use the sound of words to convey meaning.  The students worked with Spanish words to create a poem focusing entirely on sound and read “Jabberwocky” – a poem that uses a lot of made-up words, yet still clearly tells a story.

Social Studies: The students engaged in an activity where we took a look at an essential question: “Did Christopher Columbus still believe that he had reached Asia when he died?”  We read a textbook and several primary sources to see what we could learn about that question.  This was a key activity for talking about what primary sources are, how historians learn about the past, and in what ways we can and can’t trust information from all sources.

Science: Students finished up planning out their science posterboards.  Next week, we get to put them together!

Math: Students learned about rounding and comparing decimal numbers.  We also learned about multiplying and dividing numbers with decimals by powers of 10 (10   100    1,000    etc.).