November 24, 2014

Students were very excited to receive their Bibles two weeks ago at our Bible ceremony. You can see pictures from that below. We learned last week how to use them to look up verses, and today I explained how we'll be creating a Jesse Tree during Advent. Each student has a story that they should summarize and create a symbol for, and these will be due throughout the month of December. The Jesse Tree traces the family tree of Jesus, beginning with the creation of the Earth and Adam and Eve, leading all the way up to the stories in the New Testament about Jesus' birth.

We're almost done reading The Bad Beginning. We've been talking lately about how we can look for certain signs in the reading, such as "again and again" and "aha moments" to help us understand what's happening in the text. Once we're done with this book, we'll begin a unit focusing on non-fiction.

I've been loving the students' writing lately! We've been working on several persuasive essays. The most recent one was written from the point of view of a turkey in disguise. I was impressed by all the humor and the sentence variety in these! We'll keep on working on persuasive writing in December.

In math, we're doing a unit on tables, graphs, and data. Many students are already very familiar with how to read graphs, so hopefully it'll be a nice brain break before we start fractions. This unit is very short, so I expect our test to be Thursday, December 11. This may change based on how quickly the students grasp the material, though.

We've been continuing learning how to read maps in social studies. We made our own maps of the classroom last Friday, with an X marking "treasure" that students had hidden. Students then switched maps and had to use their new map to find the other group's treasure. We'll also have a test on this the second week of December, on Friday, December 12. Students will need to know the continents and oceans, as well as how to read a map.

Finally, in science, we had a great time at the Nature Museum on Friday! We took iPads with us, and students worked in groups to take pictures that will help them create a movie about ecosystems today. We'll take our test tomorrow, and then begin a unit on weather in December.