Week of January 18th

Wow, can you believe Friday marked the end of the second quarter?!! I simply cannot believe we are half way through the school year!  Report cards will come home this Friday (January 22nd). We finished our winter NWEA testing last week and I was pleased with many of the scores.  We are doing well and showing growth, but still have a lot of hard work to do!! I will be sending NWEA/MAP testing information home in their report cards.

There is no school on Monday and it is a PIR day for the teachers.  I get to learn more about our new Go Math series.  

In reading, we are continuing on with Unit 4: Digging Up a Story. This week we will read a story called "Boy Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs" in our Theme Readers. We will focus on the skills of visualizing, writing and understanding similes, mood and tone in a story, and work on prefixes. Our theme vocabulary words this week are enormous and clue.

In writing, we will start a descriptive essay, really focusing on using great describing adjectives and descriptive adverbs. Hopefully we will be able to type our final drafts next week. When we typed our Expressions Poems last week, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly most of the students were able to type. And most were able to change font, size, and print on their own. Woo hoo! Sure makes my life easier :)

In science we will do our third, and final, glider trial. Takoda and Devlin blew everyone out of the water last time. Their gliders, carrying cargo, went over 20 feet! Wowzers!

In math we are finishing up chapter 6 on understanding division.  We will look at multiplication and division fact families and dividing by 1 and 0.  By the end of the week we will take our chapter 6 test. Please continue to make time to study multiplication and division facts at home. It really makes a difference.  

In social studies this week we will read and learn about Martin Luther King Jr. 

At home it is really important to make sure your kiddo is reading AT LEAST 15 minutes per night.  If they are reading more that is wonderful!  This helps so much to support growth in the classroom!! If they are in between chapter books, Raz Kids or Epic! are wonderful options for reading sources, too!

Code Word: Half Way!