Thick and Thin questions, more patterning practice and The Six Kingdoms

Today I began reading a book as a read-aloud called "The Tree of Life" which is from our Literacy Place program and goes along with the skill of self-monitoring, or making sure we understand. The tree of life talks about biodiversity and the classification system, so it ties in well with our science unit. However, the book discusses only five kingdoms, while our science program talks about six kingdoms! Next time we have science, we are going to investigate why this might be.

As we are reading "The Tree of Life" we will be using our skills of self-monitoring. Today we learned to ask ourselves questions as we read, some which we could call "thick" questions (those that are deeper and require some thinking and explaining) and "thin" questions (those that can be taken directly from the text or might be one-word answers). As we continue to read I will be encouraging students to ask themselves thick questions to help better understand the story.

The shared reading portion of our lesson today began with a magazine article called Ad Busters, which talk about two girls from New Zealand who decided to fight against false advertising after they learned some facts about the amount of vitamin C in a popular drink. As we read this text in pairs, students will be encouraged to demonstrate understanding by writing down some thick questions and sharing them with the class for discussion.

In math we have finished up our lesson on number patterns and tomorrow will be beginning to learn about solving equations, such as _ + 4 = 3 +8. Students sometimes can have difficulty soling these types of equations. They need to remember to solve for all the constants first. In this case, find 3+8 = 11, and then ask themselves, WHAT +4 = 11? Hopefully, they will discover that subtracting 11-4 will give them this answer. We will likely be working on this for Thursday and Friday. Here is a video that we will be watching in class.

Our science lesson today dealt with identifying the 6 kingdoms and the major characteristics of each. We are learning that they are often distinguished by how they get food and if they can move or not. We will be finishing this later in the week.

On Wednesdays, we will be doing health as well during our short french time. In health, we have been learning about healthy communication skills. We learned that good communication involves looking at the speaker, using appropriate body language and practicing active listening skills. We will be practicing some of these over the next lesson or so.