Weeks of January 31 and February 7

Two productive weeks are coming to an end. During our math blocks we have been making progress with fractions, and started our journey in understanding decimals. How would you write and say parts of one hundred in Spanish? My students have learned the difference between "centésimas" and "décimas", and how to relate that to money.  During our investigations, the students have been using ten base blocks, dimes and pennies to show quantities smaller than one whole, also comparing them to the right fraction expressions. During Number Corner, the students have been also investigating different types of lines, different types of angles, and how to understand story problems. Using the strategy of "numberless problems", the students get to investigate the story that the problem shows, without getting caught in doing something with the numbers right away, because the numbers are blacked out. Then, discussions are generated, what is happening in the story?, what is the problem asking?, what type of equations we might be able to use and why? Once the students get a good understanding of the story, it is time to show the numbers and do the equations. The conversations generated are very engaging and interesting, some students even start to use pictures to explain the story, like real mathematicians do!
During reading block, we have continued learning about personal narrative, identifying how authors show their feelings in their stories, learning how we should quote and paraphrase when we are responding to reading, and describing the reactions of the characters to events in the story to understand how the characters evolve. 
On writing, we have been working on narrowing our focus to a very small event, zooming in to describe it with detail, and we have been learning the difference between "telling" and "showing",  practicing imagining small details to use in our writing, like how to describe feeling excited, or scared, describing the setting, writing our thinking process in that moment, and adding dialogue whenever we think about what the people in our story was saying at that moment.
On read aloud day, we read "All Are Welcome" by Alexandra Penfold, as a school wide event, and during 100 day, students created number lines with 100/4 and 100/2, and worked on other activities of their choice.
Take a look at this week's pictures!