Brrr!

 Hello again!  We had another fabulous week here in Room 11!  In ELA this week we started to work on opinion writing.  We started small by going through the writing process for an opinion paragraph about what animal makes the best pet.  Students brainstormed, planned their paragraph, wrote a rough draft, revised and edited and wrote a final draft all in their writing journals.  We focused on writing strong topic and concluding sentences, as well as backing up our reasons with examples and details to make our paragraphs stronger.  We will continue to work on opinion writing for the next several weeks!  We also continued to work on making inferences this week.   We read the book Two Bad Ants and practiced using clues from the text to infer where the ants in the story were.  Then, we read short paragraphs and practiced answering inference questions together and identifying the clues that helped us to make the inference.  We also read a fascinating article called Escape from Alcatraz about Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers escape from the famous prison.  We were all fascinated by this mysterious true story!  We used this article to practice finding strong details to support inferences.

In Social Studies this week we continued our unit on the Haudenosaunee.   We learned more about longhouses this week.  We looked at drawings of Haudenosaunee villages and worked on drawing conclusions about their lives from evidence in the pictures.  Then, students read about how longhouses were made and did a sequencing activity where they had to put the steps of building a longhouse in order.

In Science this week students finished creating their Twist-o-matic experiment where they explored the release of energy in their model amusement park rides.

As you can see we were very busy this week!  I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!  Please feel free to reach out with any questions.

A few reminders:

• Tuesday, February 7th is a half day for students.  They will be dismissed at noon.
• Our Valentine´s Party will be on Tuesday, February 14th.  A sign up for items for the party has been sent out.  I will send home a class list on Monday for students who would like to make valentines.