Week of November 3rd

This week in reading we worked on plot diagrams and different types of conflict. We used our books to determine the introduction, the rising action, climax, falling action, and the resolution of stories. We also talked about four different types of conflict in stories: character vs. character, character vs. nature, character vs. society, and character vs. himself/herself. We also did centers about homonyms. Homonyms are words that are spelled the same and sound the same but have different meanings. In Writing, we started our new unit on Essays. We worked this week on making observations and then thinking about our realizations about our observations. In Science, we played a game to help us learn what animals need to survive. It was a game of chance with rolling a die. If we rolled certain numbers, our animals would receive food, water, or shelter. If we rolled for all three needs, an offspring was born. If we did not roll for all three needs, one would die. We also started learning about animal adaptations. We worked on a center activity with our partner matching an animal with it's adaptation to help it survive. In Math, we worked with rectangular arrays. We arranged square tiles into rectangles in various ways. For example, we learned that we can make a 1x24, 2x12, 3x8, or a 4x6 size rectangle all from 24 square tiles! Next week we will begin to see how this connects to factors and multiples. In Social Studies we continued to learn about colonization. Most exciting of all this week was that we were able to watch a video recording of President Elect Obama's victory speech. We talked about how historical this week has been! Some day when our children are sitting in our seats in school they are going to read about this day in their Social Studies books, and we will be able to say that we lived through it! How amazing!