History & Geography

This week we began our next unit on the making of the Constitution. We started off by watching some classic Schoolhouse Rock videos: “No More Kings” and “The Preamble”. The class had fun singing along and learning the words to “The Preamble”. On Friday we worked on labeling all the 13 original states and had an interesting conversation on compromise and what the delegates at the Constitutional Convention went through to make decisions about this ground breaking document.and their future as a country.

Our weekly objectives were to:
• Identify the causes of the Revolutionary War
• Understand the difficulty facing the new nation after the war.
• Understand the disorder of American society in the 1780s after the war
• Recall the details of Shays’s Rebellion
• Recognize that America needed laws that everyone would obey
• Understand that the Constitution resulted from the work of a group of men who did not always agree
• Recognize the importance of compromise in creating the Constitution

Science

Insect reports…

I was so impressed to come to school on Tuesday and find out that everyone had worked on their insect reports over the long Snow Day

… at home!

weekend. From the looks of it, the class is doing a terrific job and enjoying working on them. I reviewed the expectations for the reports in class on Tuesday. Reports and models will not be due until early March but students may continue to work on the reports at home as well as in class. I haven’t set an exact due date because I’m waiting to see when we will be wrapping up the lessons left in this unit, it’s hard to tell what the weather has in store for us. On Thursday the class enjoyed making glowing love bugs in honor of Valentine’s Day. This week we learned about fireflies and other insects that sing.

Our weekly objectives were to:
• Classify and identify insects as small 6 legged animals with three body parts
• Identify and describe the three body parts of insects: head, thorax, and abdomen
• Identify the placement and / or purpose of an insect’s body parts
• Describe an insect’s exoskeleton
• Compare and contrast Grasshoppers and crickets
• Explain how bioluminescence Works
• Plan and draft an informative text that presents information about insects, including a topic relevant, facts, and a conclusion
• Participate in a research project on insects

Love bugs that glow!

English Spelling and Writing

In our journals we used the idiom of the week, “He’s opening a can of worms” and related it to what we learned about the Constitutional Convention . The class took their practice spelling test on Thursday and final test on Friday. Our Word Wall words were: phone, played, pretty.