Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!
Thank you for offering your children life experiences and a chance to read over the break!

Please make sure to reference the email from Mrs. Ford about upcoming assessments.  We will be giving a NRT assessment and CoGAT over the next two weeks.  Testing will require us to move schedules around, so our blocks of learning will be modified over the next few weeks.  The information below will catch you up on the learning that we will cover from 1/11-1/22.

Language Arts
Reading- We have entered the second C in the CCP process.  Students have consumed (read) many great examples of narrative.  We will spend the next few days reading like critiques to determine if an author uses various craft elements to enhance their story.  The next few days we will look at ways to use dialogue to move a story rather than just using dialogue for the fun of making commas and quotation marks!
Writing- Students will begin using the narrative arc to help them plan out a story before writing. This pre-writing tool is helpful for writer's to use to see if a story is worthy of taking to publication.  If the parts of a narrative aren't clear, it might be a story simply worth remembering but not taking through the writing process to publication.
Spelling-Your children completed a midyear inventory last week in Word Study.  I was so pleased to see how they have progressed in their knowledge of spelling concepts.  We will reorganize ourselves into new spelling groups this week.  New spelling words will come home on 1/13.  Our test will be on 1/20 and an application grade will be taken between 1/21 and 1/26.  Your support at home with spelling concepts is appreciated.

Social Studies
The third 9 weeks brings us to our unit called, Story of America.  You may remember it as history! :)  Last week we discussed the terms; past, present, future, year, decade, century and millennium.  We will use the next few weeks to think about the time and life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Students will work to complete a learning menu.  Activities on the menu will challenge them to think about their dreams for our country, how MLK Jr.'s life and death impacted the way we do things today and ways we can honor those who have made a difference in the history of our country and world.

Math
In math this week, we will continue working on multiplication and division. On Monday, we will play the game kahoot which will review the vocabulary and skills from multiplying and dividing. On Wednesday, we will review for our test on Thursday. We will prepare in class for our test so no review will be sent home. On Thursday we will take our multiplication and division test. Due to testing this week, we will not have a problem of the week. On Monday, your child will come home with an addition and subtraction review worksheet. We will have our normal Mangahigh homework on Tuesday and Wednesday night. We will still have our fast facts quiz on Friday. It will not be a grade this week.

Science
In science this week, we will begin keyboarding. We will spend the three days that we are not testing learning how to keyboard. We will work on the proper keyboarding posture and we will work on using the home row keys. We will spend these days doing lessons and practice building keyboarding skills.