We had a successful week of dividing! We practiced our expanded notation method, which a lot of students are really enjoying. We also learned our third and final method for dividing, called "Digit-by-Digit Method". This strategy is the same as the standard algorithm for dividing that you and I both learned in school. After our final lessons on division strategies, each student reflected and chose the method that they are the most successful with. What was so cool to see was that all three methods were represented throughout the class! As I walked around the room Thursday and Friday, I noticed that students thought very hard as to which method was the best fit for them, and some of them even decided to change their method after realizing it wasn't the most successful for them.

We took our first quick quiz this week and took a math engagement survey to reflect on their attitude towards math and how they feel they learn the best in math. It will be interesting to see what has changed between this survey and the same one they took at the beginning of the school year. Next week, we will dive into remainders and how they can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the scenario of the word problem.

This week in our social studies textbooks, we read about the Woodland, Mississippian, and Oneota people. The students were very impressed at how advanced they got in tools they made and used and what their homes looked like. We also learned that the Native Americans who lived close to our time period did things a lot like we still do today. They were excellent farmers and grew squash, beans, and corn that they called "The Three Sisters". They decorated their clothes, changed their hairstyles, and behaved much like we do today!

We also learned about Native American effigy mounds, which were mounds of rock and dirt that were shaped like different animals. Each effigy mound stood for something, and we learned about what some of the symbols meant. The kiddos enjoyed making their own effigy mound design and wrote a short paragraph as to what their effigy mound symbol meant to them.

Reading: We spent most of our week talking about figurative language. The kids have an anchor chart in their reading notebooks with a description and example for each. They used these anchor charts to help them “discover” figurative language in poetry. As they found an example while reading, they listed the poem title, type of figurative language, and the quote from the poem. Of course the onomatopoeias (sound words) and alliterations (repetition of beginning sounds) were the easiest to find, but many students also found hyperboles, personifications, similes, and metaphors. I was very impressed with the effort the students put into investigating the poetry they were reading.

Writing: This week the students wrote, revised (polished), and published two original poems. These poems - shape and action verb - will be part of the poem packet they will be bringing home at the end of the poetry unit. A shape poem is a poem where the words either create a shape that relates to the poem or the words fill-in a shape that relates to the poem. An action verb poem is a poem that has an action verb as the beginning word in each line. The action verbs all relate to the topic of the poem. Part of the “publishing” process was to add color and illustrations to the poems. We have talked about how poems are not only meant to be enjoyed in your mind, but they are also verbally and visually artistic.

Email: dewilyn@pewaukeeschools.org
Website: http://pewaukee.schoolwires.net/site/Default.aspx?PageID=1028
Phone: (262) 701-5557