Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Updates and announcements

I hope everyone had a wonderful 3-day weekend while remembering the great work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Our field trip this year will be to the Renaissance Fair on Tuesday, February 28th. If you would like to volunteer for this trip, please let me know.

Our wish list has been updated. We are running low on glue sticks. Students are very thorough in gluing in their notes.

With the amount of notes we have taken, students are also running out of room in their notebooks and have depleted my supply of extras, if your child has run out of room (particularly in history and writing/grammar), please send an additional notebook with them.

Our week in learning

We have enjoyed reading The Secret Garden in class and have been completing daily journaling based on the book. We also are focusing on comparing and contrasting setting in the story.

This week in Grammar we are beginning our next writing assignment. Students will be using the AZMerit rubric to help them complete an informative essay about the the interaction of humans and the environment. This will primarily be an in class assignment as we help prepare them for the writing prompts on AZMerit.

We will have our quiz over Roots 51-54 on Wednesday.  Students should study these nightly!

Our next poem is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. We will take the time to discuss the meaning of the poem in class and recitations will be Wednesday, February 1st.

We will continue to learn about the plant kingdom. This week will be our first lesson on reproductive life cycles in plants as well. Be on the lookout for science homework in the form of journal entries too!

This week, students will learn about the execution of King Charles I and Britain’s Puritan “King”, Oliver Cromwell. Students will also learn how King Charles I’s sons came to power after Cromwell’s death. Students will be writing a short newspaper article describing the circumstances around King Charles’s trial and execution. Students will be receiving the Unit study guide on Thursday (due on Tuesday, January 24th), and the test will be on Thursday, January 26th. The East Coast study guide is due on Wednesday, January 18th and the quiz will be the following Wednesday, January 25th.


This week we will review finding areas of a triangle and will them move on to finding the area of Parallelograms and rectangular prisms and cubes.  We will have math groups on Wednesday!