Classroom Update: September 21, 2019

For the past two weeks, we have continued to roll out our first learning units of the year.

In reading, we are working on building our "reading stamina," the amount of time we can stay engaged in a text. We started tracking our stamina as a whole class, and students were asked to track their own stamina at home this week.

A key component of building our reading stamina is selecting a "just right" book. We discussed how, in order to grow as readers, we need to find books that aren't too easy or too hard. A strategy that we practiced to find a "just right" book is called the Five Finger Rule:

This strategy is a quick and easy way to determine if any book is at a comprehensible level.

Finally, in reading this week, we also practiced writing summaries. We used the chant Someone-Wanted-But-So-Then (shown below) to help us capture and organize all of the story elements featured in a given text.


In writing, we created "Heart Maps" to use as inspiration for the pieces that we will work on this year. Students reflected upon the people, places, events, and interests that are special to them:

We used these heart maps as a launching point for our first writing unit of the year, where students will be crafting personal narratives.

In social studies, students extended the mapping practice that we have been doing to create maps of New England. We are narrowing this focus to Massachusetts, and later to our local community of Arlington.

In math, we are practicing strategies to memorize our multiplication facts. We are beginning with the easiest fact families to commit to memory, the 1, 2, 5, and 10 tables. We have also been practicing writing and solving multiplication word problems. Lastly, we have practiced creating rectangular arrays to represent multiplication expressions. Arrays are visual displays composed of rows of equal columns. To the right is an example of a 3x4 array.