March 23-27

This is the last week of third quarter! Wow, time is flying! FYI...report cards are issued the week after Spring Break. 

This week:
Wednesday: School-wide PJ party for Make a Wish Foundation- see below for more info! 
Friday: no school for kids-beginning of Spring Break
-Safe travels to anyone heading out next week for a Spring Break Adventure!  

"Kids Helping Kids"

Make a Wish Foundation

A May Watts Service Club Project

The Service Club is organizing a fundraiser to support the Make a Wish Foundation of Illinois. This foundation makes dreams come true for Illinois children with life-threatening conditions. On Wednesday, March 25th, we're holding a school-wide PJ party. To participate, students donate $1.00 or more to wear their PJs and help a child's dream come true. For more information about the organization, visit their web site: http://illinois.wish.org/

5H Math:

This week we'll finish up working on converting customary units. We need a little more work with volume (pints, cups, etc) and then will move on to customary weight (ounces, pounds and tons). We'll have a quiz this Thursday on converting customary length, volume and weight measurements. 

Language Arts:

All week we'll be working on our third quarter performance task. For this quarter, kids will need to write an "on the scene" report of an event that occurred leading up to the American Revolution. They will need to combine information from multiple sources, and determine the most important information about the event. Then students will have to choose either an historical person who took part in the event or a fictitious person who could have experienced the event. The second part of their writing piece will be a Q&A with their chosen person about the event. Kids will need to express how this event impacted the life of the person. 

In addition to the performance task, we will try and finish up Red Kayak. We will look at a couple passages from the text that are particularly important; one that helps us better understand the characters and their motivations and another that is a turning point in the story. I'll be collecting kids' reading notebooks at the end of the week to grade a few written responses they've made about Red Kayak. They'll get these back after break, and I'll have them bring them home for you to see. 

We'll also be working on comparing how two different texts present information about the same topic, and think about how texts are organized. For example, some nonfiction texts are written chronologically, while others are written in a cause/effect or problem/solution format. We'll look for key words that help us understand the structure. 

Social Studies:

This week we'll finish watching "America the Story of Us" which will allow kids to see more of the events that happened during the war. Kids will learn about two important leaders, George Washington and King George III. We will also do a bit more reading about the Declaration of Independence. Kids will have social studies homework at least once this week. 

This Wednesday, kids will take a quiz on the causes of the American Revolution. Kids need to know several events that lead to the eventual war between the colonies and Great Britain. They will need to explain how these events lead to war. They also need to have an understanding of the similarities between the events- the colonists felt Great Britain was exercising too much control over the them and Great Britain thought they had the right to complete control over the colonies. 

Citizenship: We'll be talking about personal responsibility this week.