Our First Full Week of April

We made it through our first week back and will need to work hard to get all of our activities in before the kids' next break for Easter weekend. Here is a look at our week ahead: • There will be no April Scholastic book orders sent home until the END of the month. This is due to our school's book fair which is this FRIDAY! Our class will preview the books on Wednesday morning so that your child can fill out a wishlist. This should make shopping easier if you choose to come back to school Friday evening. The book fair is open from 3:00-8:00 on Friday. Hope to see you there! • We begin Unit 5 in reading! This unit will focus on relationships. Our first week in this unit has us reading a realistic fiction story to practice summarizing events. We will also work with some free-verse poetry to review onomatopoeia and similes. • In grammar we will study adjectives. The kids will work to differentiate between common and proper adjectives. We will also learn the capitalization rules that go along with this. • Our spelling lists this week will have a VCCV pattern. The kids will learn that vowels can take on different sounds depending upon if the consonants in the middle of a word repeat or are different. For example, the vowel sound in "dinner" is short, while the vowel sound in "blanket" is long. • In writing the kids chose a picture to work with for our new unit and have begun creating a believable character from this picture. Last week we wrote about how our character may react in everyday situations and this week we will work with creating believable problems to help the shape of a story. Be sure to ask your child about his/her character! • In math, we will be finishing up Unit 7. This week we will work with finding fractions of "one" and then work with probability. Our experiments with probability will include spinners and dice. The kids will receive a study guide/practice test near the end of the week and we will play review games on Friday. The test over Unit 7 will be next Monday, April 11th. • We finished up our glogs last week. Feel free to view them on our LMC website (the LMC website link can be found under our Educational Website portion of the blog). Once at the website, look under "Research Projects". I'm sure your child is willing to show off his/her work as well! We will take our test over the explorers this Monday, April 4th. Your child received a study guide last Thursday which you signed off on. He/she also received note cards to make flash-cards. Our next chapter in History Alive has us looking at early English settlements. This is a short chapter! The kids will analyze images of settlements and use visual details and info from the reading to create "act-it outs". These will help them understand the reasons for the success or failure of each settlement we study. The test for this unit will either be Tuesday, April 12th or Wednesday, April 13th. The kids will receive a study guide at least 2 days in advance of the test. • I think that covers everything! If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know! Have a great week!