Happy Snow Day! I hope that everyone is staying safe and warm on this cold, icy day! As I told the students on Friday, if we were not in school on Monday, then we would need to push things to Tuesday. Due to our field trip on Friday, we didn’t get a chance to take our Word Study Test or our short quiz on prefixes and suffixes. We will do those in class on Tuesday.
We had a wonderful trip to the Math Science Innovation Center on Friday! The class enjoyed participating in our “Kicking it With Newton” lesson, and had fun performing experiments about force, motion, and energy. Thank you to Mrs. Davis for joining us on our trip!
*Important Announcements*
*Parent Survey: SPES needs your help! Please take a 10-minute survey to share your input: http://tiny.cc/spesfamilysurvey (Please submit by Friday, January 18th)
*Classroom Prizes: Our class is running low on raffle prizes, and we could use some new Dollar Store prizes for our “Gotta Get It Card” drawings. Thank you in advance if you are able to send in some items!
*What Are We Learning This Week?*
*Reading:
This week we will be working on the reading strategy of formulating questions. Students will learn about 3 different levels of questions, ranging from explicit questions to inferential questions. We will use nonfiction text to practice writing questions and answering them using the text. Students will complete a comprehension assessment on Friday 1/18. During small group rotations, students will meet with me in small group and we will continue our strategy work using leveled texts. Students will also do independent rotations of read to self and writing.
As explained to the students on Friday, we will need to take our Word Study Test on Monday this week (we didn’t have time to take it in class on Friday, due to our field trip). If we have a snow day, we will take our test on Tuesday. As a reminder, 5 of the words I ask on the test will be words that are not on their analogy chart. Students will need to apply their understanding of the feature to spell these words. Students will also write 10 sentences using their words, to show they understand the meaning of their words.
We will also need to take our Prefix & Suffix quiz in class because we didn’t have time to do it on Friday.
*Math:
Students did a great job finishing up our division unit last week! This week we will move on to our new unit on fractions. There are many different concepts in our fraction unit and it will be important that students complete homework nightly and work carefully in order to master the concepts. Many of these concepts build on each other, so understanding the early concepts is very important.
This week we will learn:
- Monday – Fraction of a whole and fraction of a set using pictures & models; Fractions are a division statement (example: 5/9 means “5 divided by 9”)
- Tuesday – Equivalent fractions: what they are, and how to use multiplication and division to solve for missing numerators or denominators
- Wednesday – Comparing Fractions
- Thursday – ordering fractions using 0, 1/2, and 1 as benchmarks to help us
- Friday – review of the concepts we have learned this week
*Social Studies:
This week we will finish up our VS.5 unit on the American Revolution. We will learn about some important event during the Revolution (VS.5c):
- Battles of Lexington & Concord
- Battle of Great Bridge
- Declaration of Independence
- Jack Jouett’s Ride
- Battle of Yorktown/Surrender of British/American victory
- The class will take the VS.5 American Revolution Test on Friday, 1/18.
Please check in with your child to make sure that he or she is reviewing their notes a little bit each night.
*Science:
The students have really enjoyed learning about the Earth and how it relates to the moon and the sun! They especially have loved learning about the moon and the Apollo missions. We will check the Earth, Moon, & Sun Study Guide in class to review. Students will take the Earth, Moon, & Sun Test on Wednesday, 1/16.
Have a good week!
-Mrs. Jacobsen