Friday, December 8th, 2017 –A View from The Front Porch, Watson’s Winners Work! And Science-y Stuff…
YOUR KIDS ARE BLOGGERS! Please go to the FRONT PORCH: THE HOUSE OF READING AND WRITING Page (https://cwatsondps.wordpress.com/front-porch-the-house-of-reading-and-writing/) to check out the kids blogging about their reading. From this point on, students will be posting their Reading Responses to the Front Porch Page to share their critical thinking around the books they’re enjoying. They will also reply to each other’s ideas. This is a great way for parents to have a sense of how their own child (as well as a typical fifth grader) thinks and writes. I invite you to read this section frequently and give feedback to your child as you see fit.
IT’S TIME TO SHARE THE WORK! Also, please go to the SHOWCASE: WATSON’S WINNERS WORK! Page (https://cwatsondps.wordpress.com/about-2/) to check out our students in action. First you will find each student’s unique Small Moment story, written earlier in the fall. Writing a Small Moment teaches a writer to “pause the plot” – to stop the action and use unique vocabulary and figurative language to describe the setting, add some sensory details, or share any internal thinking of the characters. Writers also learn how to embed a life lesson or theme into their story, so that the reader can understand what the story is REALLY about. We hope you enjoy!
Below the Small Moments you will find our Whole-Class Halloween story for 2017 – NIGHT TERRORS… This was another great writing exercise, in that the story had a brief and open-ended beginning, and each student was asked to write an entry that extended the story (using only their knowledge of the last two entries written). When their bit was complete, they tapped the shoulder of the next student on the list and it grew from there. (We just squeezed this activity in between all the other subjects…)
In our first social studies unit, we were hard at work on informational writing with our Narrative Nonfiction Books, entitled, The Roads that Led to America, which can be found below Night Terrors. In writing and designing these digital books, students conducted extensive research and told the story, from multiple historical perspectives, of feudal life and how feudalism gave way to The Renaissance through the catalyst of The Crusades. The expanded world unleashed by the Renaissance then led to an Age of Exploration, which led to the discovery of The Americas. The goal of this project was for students to understand the never-ending cycle of cause and effect that drives the engine of history, and how one driving FORCE (ex: religious, political, economic, natural), causes a MOTION (ex: movement of people, goods and/or ideas), which results in great CHANGE (ex: new events and eras begin). And as the song says, “One Thing Leads to Another…”
In exciting Science news, below the Roads to America you will find pics of our science partners and some of their work in action. The kids are holding their flat models of how Earth’s systems interact in a setting, delineating between the geosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere. They are also holding their “Beanie Babies,” the beans they resurrected from the Ox Ridge garden while testing whether or not the beans had died or were just dormant. In the background are their Science Journals which contain the scientific processes for the QUESTS and INVESTigations we are involved in this year.
In the fall we went on several field studies – we searched for signs of life; we examined how earth’s systems interact cyclically in the Ox Ridge garden, and we learned to document observations of plant growth with and without the presence of dirt (the geosphere). We learned about variables and controls (or constants), as well as direct vs. inverse proportionate relationships.
We then pondered how earth systems interact with space systems, and are currently embarked on a study of how the sun, the moon and the earth interact to cause: day & night, a year, the four seasons, and the phases of the moon.
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