2H Class Blog!: Jan. 29th News

I hope everyone had a great snow day! It's hard to believe that was the first snow day of our school year. With another short week on our hands, we had a lot to cram in! Everyone worked hard and made it a fun, productive week!

Highlights from our week:

*Reading: Reader's Workshop this week had us, "Amping Up Our Reading Power!" in our latest unit. Throughout this unit, we'll be revisiting good reading habits, learning new ways to improve our fluency (how we sound when we read), interpreting literary language, and setting personal reading goals.

Beginning with fluency, we learned a song to help us remember the importance of rereading.

Sung to the tune of, "The Wheels on the Bus"...

Read parts of our books again and again

Out loud and in our heads

Read parts of our books again and again

To make our reading smooooooooth!

In addition to rereading, students learned that they can improve their fluency by:

-scooping words into longer phrases

-talking like the characters

-making your voice match the mood

-reading with a just right pace

To help reinforce all these fluency strategies, students created their first "Selfies!" Students chose a picture book that they had never read before and recorded themselves doing a first read. They'll reread their chosen story each day during reader's workshop and then create a second "selfie" to see how much they're fluency has improved. They had a TON of fun creating these videos and I can't wait to see their next one!

*Writing: As students finished up drafting and editing their gripping, fictional stories, it was time to put on the finishing touches and get their books sent to the publishers. Each Owl wrote an "About the Author" page and illustrated a beautiful cover using a crayon resist technique. We hope to celebrate these exciting stories next week!

*Science: We continued investigating matter this week and started exploring what can happen when you mix different materials. We began by exploring what happens when you place an M&M in water. After making a hypothesis, it was time to watch!

Students were AMAZED (as was I!) to see the printed M had floated to the top!)

Recording observations after the 1 minute, 3 minute, and 5 minute mark, the Owls quickly realized that the M&Ms candy coating had dissolved, while the chocolate center remained. We left our experiment up and running overnight and discovered that the chocolate STILL had not dissolved. Wanting to see if the chocolate would EVER dissolve, we left the cups out over the weekend---what do you think we can expect to see Monday morning?

*Reading Buddies: It was another great week of design engineering with our fifth grade reading buddies! Following suit of last week, partnerships had to choose a different material for this weeks challenge: building a slide! They had 10 minutes to build this time, but many quickly realized a slide was a little more challenging than a house. Again, Mrs. Loh and I were SO impressed by the perseverance and ingenuity of each designer. Keep up the great work!