February 3-7

Not many special reminders for the week, but we do have an assembly on Wednesday. The Naperville Reads program is bringing in authors for a special assembly for fourth and fifth graders. 

 Here are our plans for the week:

5H Math: We will continue learning about converting measurements this week. We spent part of our short week last week practicing estimating and measuring using the metric system. Last week kids learned that in order to convert between measurements in the metric system, all you really have to do is move the decimal in the number, because the metric system uses the base-ten system. This is more of a "trick" and this week we will work on better understanding why this works. We will spend a couple days in the beginning of the week converting in the metric system (linear measurements), and then we will move into standard or customary measurement conversions toward the end of the week. We do not have math Wednesday because of the assembly. We will probably have a converting quiz (both metric and standard units) next week. As a reminder, we won't be converting from metric to standard or standard to metric, only converting within each measurement system. 

Language Arts:

We did not get into our new theme (At a Crossroads) as planned last week, so we will do so tomorrow. Throughout the unit we will refer to Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". We will take some time with this poem tomorrow thinking about and discussing what it could literally mean and what the possible figurative meanings are. Our focus, though, will be determining the topic and theme of the poem and explaining our reasoning. 

Throughout this unit, we will discuss how characters in books make decisions and how their decisions affect what follows. The American Revolution is also a perfect topic to discuss a time of change and the decisions that were made. 

During our language arts time, we will spend some time reading texts related to the American Revolution. One of which is a great book, George vs George (George Washington vs. King George III). It lays out a lot of information about the two leaders in an interesting format.

As part of the theme, we will also be learning about inventions late in the week. Kids will learn the reasons for inventions, and ultimately will work toward creating their own invention based on an identified need or problem. This will be an ongoing project for a few weeks, but we are starting this week by learning about inventions old and new, the inventing process including the reasons for inventions. 

Word Study: This week we'll be learning about a new syllable type, the "vowel team". We will study words with the vowel teams of: ai, ay, ee, ey, oe, oa & ue. Vowel team syllables are marked with "vv" under each syllable. Kids will have a quiz on Friday of words that contain each of these vowel pairs. 

Social Studies: Early this week we will discuss a few more reasons for the tension between the colonies and Great Britain that would eventually cause the American Revolution. For this unit, I've given the kids each a packet that has the essential questions for the unit listed, and different organizers for taking notes. 

Then we will move into important events during the war...starting of course at the beginning with Paul Revere and the battles at Lexington and Concord. We will be using our social studies texts, additional books I've gotten from the library, America: The Story of Us (History Channel video), and primary documents (speeches and documents) from the time.