I hope you all had a great Earth Day! The kids participated in some activities last week to honor the day. We have another 5 day week ahead of us! This week we will have MAP testing. The schedule for our class testing is located under our Calendar section. Please remember that there is no way to study for these tests. It is important, however, that your child eat a healthy breakfast the morning of the test and comes to school well-rested! Here is a look at our week ahead:
* Neha is our MVP this week!
* The kids will finish up the unit on drawing conclusions and determining importance. We will review finding the main idea vs supporting details. We will also review interesting facts vs important facts. The kids will use nonfiction articles to show what they have learned this week. They will be taking a written assessment that will have them mark up the pages they are reading with notes and draw conclusions about these notes in a written response. Our next unit will deal with summarizing and synthesizing information.
* We will work with comparing adjectives using more and most in grammar.
* The kids picked out their new characters on Friday during our writing time. We will be working to develop a personality of this new character this week. We will put this character through new everyday situations. The kids will also work with other ways of saying "said" when using dialogue and review using strong verbs to show the reader emotion and action.
* We began Unit 9 in math on Friday. This unit covers fractions, decimals, and percents. A parent letter about this unit went home with your child last Thursday. This week we will work to covert "easy" fractions to decimals and percents (by finding a common denominator), use a calculator to covert harder fractions to decimals, and use a calculator to convert fractions to percents. Our entire week will consist of different types of conversions.
* We started learning a bit about 3 early colonies last week in social studies. The kids will have this week to research and take notes on Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth. They will focus on one essential question: What factors influenced the success and/or failure of the early colonies? Once the research is done, your child will have a choice of 3 projects that he/she will complete individually in class. All projects will ask the kids to reflect upon the factors for a successful colony. The project choices are: a comic strip, an advice letter, or a "How to" brochure. These projects will take the place of a traditional test over the material learned in Chapter 6.
* I think that covers everything! Have a great rest of your week!
