September 17-21

It was great to see, as well as, meet some of you at Curriculum Night.  Thank you for taking some time to come in and learn about the school year.  If you were not able to make it, I understand we all have a lot of commitments in our lives, and I hope to see you throughout the year. If I have not said it enough, thank you all for your support and I am thankful to work with you and your wonderful children this year. 

This week..

Spelling: The unit 3 pretest will be given on Monday. The assignment and list will be posted under the spelling tab after school tomorrow. 

5H Math:  we will be working on rounding to specific place value throughout the week.  We are returning to converting measurements within the metric system as well as within the standard measurement system. Toward the end of the week we will be learning about line plots and making magnitude estimates for multiplication problems.

Reading: During reading this week we will be learning about making inferences using a variety of texts.  We make inferences by using clues from the text as well as our background knowledge (schema) to make conclusions. We will be reading a story from our Harcourt books to support this and will take a comprehension test for the story during the week. We have also started using our Time for Kids. 

Writing: Last week the kids made an awesome list of ways that writers write.  Kids have now chosen what type of writing they will do for their first piece.  Some of the choices we listed were: magazine articles, book reviews, fantasy stories, etc. The kids will be working on this piece this week and I will be teaching lessons on maintaining focus and support using student samples of writing.

Grammar: What is a noun? What are the types of nouns? What is a verb? 

Science: We did not begin clouds and the water cycle last week so we will begin with that this week. The kids will learn what the three main types of clouds are, what they look like, and what type of weather they indicate. We will compare weather forecasts to the actual weather of the day. We will learn about cold and warm fronts and what creates severe weather. 

Also, many students have shown interest in the optional weather research activity- I am so glad the kids are excited about this!  This week I will call kids over to make appointments with them so they know when they will present (sometime the week of Sept. 24th).  This is an optional activity so students will need to do most of the work at home.  

Citizenship: This week we will begin talking about the need for classroom problem solving between classmates when conflicts arise.