Social Studies: Our Country

We have learned so much about New York State! Some of the topics we have covered are: September 11th 2001, geography and NYS flag. Our key words have been: freedom, patriotism, heroes, landscapes and symbolism.

Now we are starting our new unit on Our Country - The USA. We will be covering: American Symbols, national parks, national holidays, american presidents, USA flag, growth in America, American leaders and patriotic songs.

We will be bringing home letters to our parents about what we are learning and mini-projects to do. The projects will be due for the following social studies class on wednesday... Its a really nice opportunity for your child to discuss with you what they know and reinforce what we have been learning!

Our "Readerly" Lives

When we are reading lots of us have this question: "What does this word mean?"

It is so good to have questions when we are reading because that shows that we are really thinking about the text!


And over these couple of weeks we have discovered strategies in which we can independantly figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word:

• Look out for the base word. If i know the base word then I can figure out the meaning together with the prefix and suffix too...


• Look out for compound words - 2 words joined together. If we know what each one means seperately then we can probably figure out the meaning of the compound.


• Look out for Idioms and sayings. They dont have literal meanings.
  
• Look out for context clues. There are so many unfamiliar words that we can understand when we look at the sentences and ideas around it...
  

We are practicing these strategies in our independant reading. And if your child asks "What does this mean?", see if they can use one of the above to figure it out...

Our Trip to Brooklyn Historical Society

We found the program "It Happened in Brooklyn" very interesting and our tour guides were so informative - we learned lots of new information. It was an experience for us being in the oldest Brooklyn Exhibit, that was made for people to research and learn about brooklyn in the 1900's!

Middah of the Week - Vatranus - Giving in...

The Middah we learnt this week is a hard one and we're looking forward to seeing how we can carry it out...

Vatranus: Giving in to others even when we really badly want something. For example letting someone go before us or giving up something we want for somebody else...

Trip to Intrepid - 19th Jan

We will be travelling together with 4th grade by school bus at 9:30am and arriving back to school at 1:30pm.

We will be having a special school 'Aviation Workshop' program there:

About our program - "UP, UP and AWAY": The science of flight comes to life as students tour the ship's Flight Deck to discover how nature influenced airplane shape and design. Participating in demonstrations of the four forces of flight, students experiment with the concepts before creating their own flying vessels.

We're looking forward to this new and exciting experience!

Middah of the Week

Hashovas Aveida: Returning lost objects

Today we talked about trying very hard to find the person who lost an object and returning it to them. We spoke about when we see things around we should not ignore but pick it up and return it to its owner...

Our Writerly Lives...

We have been immersing ourselves in Gail Gibbons' non fiction books and generating ideas for a piece of writing of our own using Gibbons strategies, like: Looking for the "How?" of everyday objects, thinking about topics that are very interesting to us and that we have lots of questions about etc. We then learned from Gail Gibbons that writers select a topic that they are excited and curious about, are able to illustrate, have lots of questions that they will be able to find answers for and will be able to find more information on... We shared our topic choice with the class and we're enthusiastic to begin...

We are ready to start collecting more information on our topic. How does Gail Gibbons collect information and research? She reads what other authors have written on the subject. We have been spending these last couple of days finding books and materials on our topic. We have searched our libraries in school, at home and some of us even went to the public library to find appropriate books! Then we took sticky notes and marked parts of books that has information we want to include in our writing.

Gail Gibbons also researches her topic by interviewing experts. In our next writing workshop on Tuesday we will be preparing interview questions to find out more about our topic.

We would love if some of our parents who are "Experts" on the topics we have chosen would be able to come in on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday to answer our questions and be interviewed by us...

These are the topics our class has chosen: sharks, giraffes, computers, human bodies, butterflies and horses.

Any parents who love animals or know about computers or know about the way our bodies work, please let me know if you are able to make it into school one day next week for a half hour. It would be so meaningful to our class!
Thanks!
You can email me or call me!

Morah Rivki