Last week in Room 30

I hope everyone enjoyed their extra long weekend last week! It was a short week back with the kids but we still managed to get in a lot of learning. We have been focusing our reading lessons on two main character concepts—character feelings and character problems. The kids have been learning how to notice and expect these story elements and then to give evidence about their thinking from the text. For example, the problem in Too Many Tamales is Maria thinks she’s lost mom’s ring because she got it stuck in the masa, so she screams “the ring” and makes her cousins eat all the tamales. They have been getting better and better explaining heir reading thinking!
In writing we worked on fine tuning our realistic fiction writing by revising. We learned that revising is adding to, moving, or removing parts of our stories. Students got to work with partners and by themselves using a checklist to revise their stories.
In math we worked on word problems using two-digit numbers and learned one more strategy for adding two digit numbers—compensation. Compensation is when mathematicians think flexibly about numbers to turn a harder problem to solve like 29+25 into a simpler problem like 30+24.
We ended our week with an amazing assembly arranged by the PTO. It was a marionette puppet show of an old Chinese folktale. We truly enjoyed the performance and had lots of questions about how it all worked. We learned a lot!