Week 26: March 5 - 9

Week 26: March 5 - 9

Reminders:
9 - Report Cards go home
12-16 Spring Break (No School)
20 - Third Nine Weeks Recognition Ceremony at 9:00 in the cafeteria
23 - Solar System Test
30 - Good Friday (No School)

Reading: Our students worked hard last week and showed amazing effort and skill on the READING practice STAAR test.  Please look for an email from your child's reading teacher by Friday, March 9th to tell you more about your child's reading strengths and areas for growth.  Mostly, know we are PROUD of their reading accomplishments thus far and it is only MARCH!

Narrative NonFiction will continue to be our genre focus for this week. Above you can see some of the titles we have been reading and discussing in class.  Specifically, this week, we will teach students a silly song that can serve as an EXCELLENT strategy for writing summaries or answering STAAR like questions about summary with narrative.  For a sneak peak, or simply to keep the fun going at home, check out this clip.



Writing: Essays will continue to be our genre of focus.  This week we will look at how to write a strong lead.  We will look at many styles and try them out with our first drafts to see which style might be most effective.  Below is a sample anchor chart.  Something like this will be built together in our classroom this week as we write.


Social Studies: Students will finish up their work with map skills.  We hope that maybe a few students have gotten excited and talked to you about how we learned to play BATTLESHIP using our grid map skills.  This week, we will also look the cultural traditions associated with St. Patrick's Day.

Math: During our math block this week, we will continue to look at division strategies and how we can apply these strategies to word problems. Your child will work to create division word problems to help with their understanding of the parts of  division word problems. On Wednesday and Friday, we will learn about area (Area Video). We have taught area models during our multiplication unit and we will make the connection between area and the area models we have already studied. On Thursday, we plan to complete a reflection paper from the practice STAAR that was taken last Monday. This tool helps your child zone in on the concepts they really understand and helps us to identify areas of need. We will send this paper home with your child so that you can use this as a discussion tool at home.

For homework this week, we will have a worksheet come home on Monday - Wednesday. We will not have a problem of the week this week. We will take a fast facts quiz on Friday. If you plan to be out of school on Friday, please let your child's teacher know so that they can take their fast facts quiz before the break.

Science: This week during science, we will continue talking about the relationship between the sun, moon, and Earth and our other planets. On Monday, we will work on the next set of vocabulary cards for the solar system unit. We will send home these cards and review sheet so that your child will be able to study nightly for our test. The date of the test Friday, March 23rd.  During the rest of the week, we will be studying the planets.