Updates and announcements

Our school year is off to a great start! Students are settling in to our classroom procedures nicely.

Students earned their first “Free Choice Friday” last week by earning all of the letters of “Responsibility” for good behavior, compliments from other teachers, etc. Students are allowed to bring in board games, drawing paper and materials, and other items that will not cause a problem. Please remember that toys are not allowed at school.

Our week in learning

This week, students will learn about punctuation rules and analogies in grammar. On Friday, they will take their first grammar quiz over capitalization and punctuation rules and analogies. Expect to see grammar notebooks coming home regularly to study this week!

In literature, students will read chapters 2 and 3 of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and practice their summarization skills. They will also begin to build a character profile of a main character in their literature notebooks.

In science this week, students will learn about experimental variables and control variables. They will study the parts of airplanes and discuss how airplane engineers change one variable at a time to determine which variables affect a plane’s efficiency. On Thursday and Friday, students will complete a lab in which they design their own paper gliders and alter variables to see which experimental variables make their planes fly farther. They will calculate the average distance for each variable out of three trials, then calculate the percent change in distance each variable made.

This week in History, students will learn finish the World Lakes unit with the Lakes of Eurasia. Study Guides went home last Friday for the World Lakes Test. The World Lakes Test will be on Thursday, August 17th. On Wednesday in geography, students will learn about time zones and climate zones in relation to latitude and longitude. Students will start learning about Ancient Meso-American cultures on Friday by labeling a map of Central and South America.

This week in Math, students will practice approximation and estimation of very large numbers, greatest common factor, lowest common multiple, prime factors, exponents, and multiplying by multiples of ten. Weekly Math Groups will begin later in the quarter.