The Week of March 14th

We are just a few days away from spring break! The kids will be in school 3 days this week and then will have Thursday and Friday off during parent/teacher conferences. Classes for students will resume on Monday, March 28th. I hope everyone has a happy and enjoyable spring break! Here's a look at our week ahead:

Since this is only a 3 day week for the kids, there will be no Treasures reading or spelling. We will, however, still work with the grammar piece of Treasures since we didn't have a chance to finish our work from last week. We will focus on using possessive pronouns. The kids will be able to explain the differences between regular and stand-alone possessive pronouns. We will take a short quiz over this on Wednesday.

In social studies, the kids will continue to work on their explorer report. Last week they did a great job researching and compiling facts about their explorer. This week the kids will begin working on their Glog--an interactive poster. They will not only be typing in information about their explorer, but they will also find pictures, movies, and other websites that can be linked to their glog.

In writing we will be focusing on dialogue this week. The kids created their own comic strips today in class and worked with talking bubbles. Tomorrow we will go over the three rules of punctuating dialogue and they will have a chance to create some narrative pieces that include conversations between characters. We are also working on tagging dialogue with strong verbs. Did you know that there is over 100 ways to say "said"?

During math this week, the kids will work to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators. We will be covering this in multiple sessions. The first session will review how to find the least common multiple of 2 numbers. The second session will cover how to create an equivalent fraction with these common denominators. If time permits, we will also do more work with equivalent fractions/multiple names for fractions. Whatever we don't finish this week, we will pick right back up after break. The kids are realizing how important their multiplication facts are when working with fractions! Please continue to encourage them to practice each night!

In reading we are working to finish the novels that we are reading in our small reading group. We will have this work to share with you during conferences later in the week. We will begin new novel groups after we return from group.

There will be 2 reading logs and only 1 response sent home with your child for nightly reading. The reading logs are for both this week and next week. The students can pick which week or book they would like to do their response on. All 3 sheets are due on Monday, March 28th and should be stapled together before being turned in.

I look forward to meeting with you during conferences to discuss the progress of your child. I will be using the 321 Conference form to help prepare our time together. Should anything else come up that you would like to discuss, please let me know. Please keep in mind that we will need to stick to our 15 time slot. Feel free to knock on the door during your scheduled conference time to help keep us on track.

I think that does it for this week. Have a wonderful spring break!!!!