Making Connections!

This week our reading focus has been Making Connections: I can connect what I have read to other text, to myself and the world. When making connections, we relate a piece of the story or entire story to an experience we have felt, read or heard about in the world. We use worlds like "This reminds me of..." or "I can relate to this because.."

We started out with finding connections, text to self. I read the class Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. A book where everything just seems to go wrong. Then the students completed a double journal entry, choosing a section from the book that they had experienced or could relate to.
Next we connected text to text, by reading Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs. This book reminded us of a couple other stories, but mainly, the original Goldilocks. As a class, we chose an example from the book that we could relate to the original story.

Finally, we read Something Beautiful- a story of a girl who is from a low income area and is looking for something beautiful. As she goes around her neighbourhood she learns what every person finds beautiful and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We could relate this to other ideas we know in our world and how not everyone has the same living situation.


In Math, we are almost done patterns! We will be having our unit test on Monday and doing some review activities at the end of this week.
We are now able to identify if a pattern is increasing or decreasing, describe attributes, identify pattern rules, extend a pattern with a rule and translate patterns into T tables.

In Social, we have begun to read about the 6 Natural Regions of Alberta. Students read descriptions of the regions, compared them and located them on a map of Alberta. Using visualization, in small groups students read about the regions and drew pictures of what they imagined they might look like. We also used Quizlet this week to practice our social terms! Quizlet is an interactive vocab stusying guide where students can work off vocabulary lists I have made or create their own list and play games.

In Science we have been working with pulleys and demonstrating how they work! Using the monkey bars on our playground, we used a simple pulley to lift a chair off the ground. Depending where we attached the pulley really made a difference in our effort needed!
When we attach the pulley to a fixed location (like the monkey bar) and try to lift the chair it felt about the same in effort. However, when we moved the pulley to be attached to the load and anchored our rope on the other side our effort was reduced by half! Then we used a pulley to send a bucket from side to side.