Basketball Champs, MCAS, and the Power of Persuasion

The Basketball Tournament was this weekend and we had some members from the Championship team in our classroom. Georgia and Matthew were both on the team that won first place in the basketball tournament and they brought their trophies to share with the class. I was able to attend part of one game, which I heard went into triple overtime. The best part was that Sunderland won in overtime! 

We started a new unit in Writer's Workshop. This unit will focus on persuasive and opinion writing. We jumped right into this new style of writing by writing to persuade Mr. B to give us P.E. everyday. Students learned that when you are trying to persuade someone you need to consider who you audience is. You may think P.E. Is awesome, but that reason probably isn't going to convince the principal to do what you want. After students finished their writing we invited Mr. B to our classroom to do our best to convince him we should have P.E. everyday. Did it work? We are still waiting to find out.

For our next lesson, students learned how a persuasive writer looks at the world a little differently. Persuasive writers look at the world and see things they can do to make it better. Persuasive writers see not only problems that exist around them; they also imagine possible solutions to that problem. Students thought about things here at Sunderland they might like to change. What do think could use improving? The playground, of course. Students looked at the playground and imagined possible ways to make our playground safer and more fun.

In reading students have been prepping for the MCAS ELA Reading Comprehension Test. Students have been taking practice tests, studying MCAS vocabulary words, and also learning how to make inferences. Inferences are when you take information from the text and what you already know and make a educated prediction about something happening in the text.

Take a peek into our classroom. Here are some pictures that were taken over the past couple of weeks while the blog was down. Enjoy!