Learning Update

Reading: This week we continued to work on studying characters. We paid close attention to how our characters were acting, what they were doing, and what they were saying. We asked “How does the character feel?” and then we backed up our thoughts with proof from the text. We noticed that we could tell a lot about how our characters were feeling just by listening to the words they said or by studying their body language. 

Writing: We have been working hard on our Persuasive Writing Unit. We’ve learned that the best persuasive letters focused on important issues and helped make our home, neighborhood, or school a better place.

We always begin our letter with our opinion. We stated our opinions in our letter using the “I think….” sentence starter. When we state our opinion, it becomes clear what we want the other person to think as well. We’ve learned that it is important to think about our audience for our letters. If there is something we want to change in our home, then the best audience for our letter is someone at home not at school.

We’ve discussed how to give good reasons in our letters. Just saying that we really want something is not good enough! We need to share with our audience why it is important to us. We also discussed mini-moment reasons. These are little stories where we share a time when we saw the problem in our own lives. After our mini-moments, we also discussed how we need to add a solution to our letter. This is how we are going to help fix the problem.

Math: We continued to work on subtraction and learned the strategy of labeling our equations TOTAL – PARTNER = PARTNER, drawing the math mountain to go with the equation. We check to see if our answer makes sense in the math mountain (the largest number always has to go at the top). If we make a mistake, the math mountain helps us to fix it.

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