Hello Room 113 Families,
Welcome back from Spring Break! I hope your travels went well, or that your “staycation” was relaxing. This week we will get back to work in all subject areas with habits that will build success in your students. The Aquasox Hit a Home Run for Reading program will help with one of the all-time, most important habits . . . being a consistent and fluid reader. This week will be "Third Base" with the Aquasox, so please sign your student’s reading log so he or she can score the prizes! And now, here are the plans for the week.
Sometime this week, please return the outer envelope of your child's report card to school so it can be reused at the end of the year.
•April 17 PTSA Meeting 6:45 PM in the Library
•April 19 Talent Show Rehearsal 6:30 PM
•April 21 Early Dismissal 1:00 and Voice Groups
•April 3-28 Aquasox Reading Program Continues, ends on the 28th
•April 24-28 ME Food Drive
•April 27 ME Talent Show at 6:30 PM
The next 4 lessons in Unit 8 focus on the skills of Graphing Line Plots, Perimeter and Area of Rectangles, Cubic Units and Volume of Rectangles and Visualizing Volume.
Following this, students will study Volume Formulas, Relating Length, Area and Volume, Volume of Composite Solid Figures and Attributes of Quadrilaterals and Triangles.
In our recent reading unit, students have discussed how articles, nonfiction books, and functional texts are organized. They will learn that some articles are organized to present a single point of view, while others discuss both the pros and cons of an issue. They will continue to learn that nonfiction books often use structures such as sequence, cause/effect, and compare/contrast to organize information. Analyzing text structure, or understanding how texts are organized, can help readers make sense of what they are reading.
Content: We continue in our fiction fantasy short story writing project this week. Students have been drafting their stories and following the main character (protagonist) “scene by scene” to create a mind movie for the reader. They will learn that writers who include qualities like dialogue, action, setting and internal thought create a well-balanced story that “shows” more than it “tells.” This project integrates the work we’ve done in analyzing literature as well as what we’ve studied in the personal narrative writing project. Drafting will end this week with revising dialogue that is anchored in setting or action, as an alternative to writing words that merely create a conversation without detail about how the words were said, or what the character did whilst saying the words. This revision will round out our work in writing this week.
Grammar: This week we will focus on how to correctly punctuate dialogue in our writing.
Spelling: Students will begin their next spelling study on Tuesday, where all students will study the same sort, but will have different assignments based on their needs as a speller. Studying Greek and Latin Roots will not only help students as spellers, writers and readers, but will also help them with upcoming science lessons.
Students will begin the first investigation in our new FOSS environment kits, where they will act as scientists who observe and compare a variety of organisms, gain experience planting and mapping seeds of different kinds, identify factors that make up a terrestrial environment, observe their terrariums over time and record changes in their science journals and use scientific thinking processes to conduct investigations and explain their thinking and findings. These observations will be recorded every 2-3 days over the next two weeks.
Credits:
Created with images by RonBerg - "ladybugs ladybirds bugs" • Photo-Mix - "the action plan the road map notes" • Wokandapix - "calculator math mathematics" • ZapTheDingbat - "Reading" • uberculture - "small terrarium"