The Week of March 7th--a normal week!!!

Congratulations to all of our students for doing a wonderful job on their ISAT tests last week. They made it through 8 tests and did a great job of staying focused and keeping a positive attitude through it all. Thank you to the parents who encouraged the children to do their best and made sure that they were well-rested and had happy tummies. We're back to a regular schedule this week and here is a look ahead:

Conference forms and Preconference sheets went home with your child last week. Please return your conference form (bottom half only) to confirm our meeting time and date. The blue preconference form should be returned by Friday, March 11th. This will help me as I prepare for our conferences the following week.

Book orders are due this Friday, March 11th. You can put your order in online or send the order in to me. Please make sure that you send in CHECKS ONLY if you are sending the order in to school. Thanks in advance for doing this!

Report cards will come home on Friday, March 11th. Please take some time to review this with your child. Keep in mind that expectations have increased and the concepts that we covered during the second trimester were more challenging. Writing was a huge component of all subjects and will continue to be during our last trimester as well! Since there will be so much information coming home with the report card, there will be no Weekly Folders sent home on Friday.

We will return to our Treasures curriculum for reading, spelling, and grammar this week. The kids will work with nonfiction text as we explore sequencing events of the story and using clues from the text to draw conclusions. The kids will also work with some poetry to review concepts such as rhyme scheme and meter.

We will take a spelling pretest on Monday to determine what spelling list your child will have for the week. Our spelling pattern for the week is words that contain a /oi/ or /ou/ sound. The kids will be responsible for completing 2 activities from the spelling menu for homework during the week.

In grammar we will review what we have learned about pronouns so far. We will also begin to work with possessive pronouns. We will talk about the difference between regular and stand-alone possessive pronouns.

We begin our new unit in math this week: Fractions and their Uses; Chance and Probability. This unit begins with a review of fraction ideas previously introduced, and extends knowledge by developing a good understanding of equivalent fractions. The main ideas for this week will be to review fractions as parts of a whole, fractions on number lines, and uses of fractions. We will also work to order fractions and find fractional parts of sets and regions.

We finished our excavations and found out some artifacts that explorers found and how they used them. The students received a study guide on Friday and will take a short quiz over these concepts and vocabulary on Tuesday. There is a link on our blog listed as History Alive! that allows the kids to take a review quiz that is VERY similar to the type of quiz they will take in class. I strongly recommend this as a study tool. This week we will begin a small research project where the kids will each be assigned an explorer. They will need to find information about the explorer such as: personal background, sponsor, motives, dates, route of exploration, and impact. We will use this information to create an online poster using the website Glogster.

I look forward to a normal schedule with our class this week! If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know! Have a great start to the week!