Hope everyone had a great holiday this past weekend or at least enjoyed having a big of a longer weekend. We are in for a full week with tons to do! Here is a look at our week ahead:
* MAP testing begins this week! Both my math class and Miss Lee's math class will take their math test on Tuesday from 10:45-12:15. Our class reading test will be the following Monday, April 28th right after lunch.
* Midterm grades will come home next Friday (May 2nd) with your child. This will be just a short glance at the grades he/she has earned so far in this last trimester. There are still plenty more grades to be entered, but this will summarize the first half of our trimester. I will also make some comments about overall effort and attitude in class.
* We celebrate Earth Week this week in class! We had a great time walking to school with some of the students this morning! The kids are encouraged to wear green and blue on Tuesday. We are also collecting empty plastic water bottles in our classroom. We are having a contest as a school to see which classroom can collect the most. If you have any that you want to pass along, feel free!
* In writing this week we will talk about the shape of a story. Stories follow the pattern of having an introduction (where we meet the characters and find the setting), the problem, rising actions, and then a climax/turn of events. We will study simple picture books to identify the shape of the story. The kids will then have a chance to create an everyday situation to put their character in, as well as plan out a problem, and rising actions. We will be revising for showing details, proper use of dialogue, and using adjectives along the way.
* We will continue our work with area this week during math. The kids will count squares to find the area of irregular shapes, however, we will begin to work with more mature concepts like using formulas to find area. We will find formulas for the areas of rectangles, parallelograms, and triangles. The kids will still need to practice their knowledge of fractions along the way as well: finding a fraction of a whole, adding/subtracting fractions, turning fractions into decimals,etc. This is actually a short unit in math, so we will finish up the last couple of lessons this week and the beginning of next. We will most likely have our test over the unit end of next week.
* We are learning about different types of erosion, weathering, and deposition. We will look at pictures of landforms to determine the cause of the formation. We will also make our own river tables to explore how moving water shaped the earth. The kids will observe pathways carved by water and how moving water carries sediment from one place to the next. This tends to be a messy project though so I am putting out an old towel request for the kids. If they can bring in any that can be used this week, that would be great! I will wash them and get them back to you next week.
* In reading, we will begin to focus on determining the importance of the material that we read. Nonfiction is full of facts and interesting details. But we can't remember everything and we don't really need to. What we do need to do is think about the information that supports bigger, more important ideas. If we can't pick out what is important, we are going to have a lot of trouble making sense of and learning from what we read. We will be learning a variety of ways to take notes and merge our thinking with the text to arrive at the most important ideas.
* I hope you all have a great start to the week! ~ Mrs. Galazka
