Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Updates and announcements

It was so great getting to meet with all of you last week to talk about your wonderful children. I hope everyone enjoyed their three-day weekend. Mine was spent sewing baby quilts.

We will be starting block scheduling this week! Students are very excited to be switching classrooms. They will have Science with Ms. Canfield and Writing/Grammar with Ms. Speagle. Classroom teachers are still responsible for assigning and reporting grades. Ms. White will be with them while they switch classes.

With the second week starting, students will be calling home when they have late homework assignments. For example, if an assignment was due on Monday and it is not turned in by Tuesday at recess, they will call home to inform a parent that they have a late assignment and it is now a zero in the gradebook. Please note that this is NOT to burden parents, or to have parents bring in the assignment, it is just to inform the parent. Students will always leave a message if needed.

The Science Fair is this Wednesday! Please come to see your child’s hard work on display.

Our Read-a-thon celebration will take place on Tuesday, October 31st. Be on the lookout for a sign up from our wonderful class parents.

Our week in learning

This week, students will start block for Writing and Grammar. They will be reviewing organization of a well-constructed paragraph.

We will start reading Where the Red Fern Grows this week. They will be working on a comprehension packet.

There will be a weekly roots quiz on Wednesday.

Poetry recitations will take place next Wednesday, November 1st.

In science this week, students will begin their classification unit, studying the animal kingdom and several different phyla and classes. They will learn the traits of different kinds of animals and how scientists distinguish them from one another. Additionally, students will put their roots skills to work learning species’ scientific names in Latin. There will be an open-note take-home quiz on Friday.

This week in History, students will begin learning about the Reformation. We will be addressing this topic as a historical event-not labeling “good” and “bad”. Students will be learning about the objective corruptions within the Catholic church at this time, then the Counter-Reformation, and lastly, the Reformation’s effect on science. This week, we will focus on other important people of the Reformation, including Zwingli, Calvin, and briefly, Henry VIII. We will get to have an enrichment day going over Henry VIII more in-depth after the unit is finished. On Wednesday, students will take the Midwest, Great Plains, and Rocky Mountain Region location quiz. We will also learn about our own Southwest region of the United States. Please note that there will be a 50 states location test before Thanksgiving Break.


This week in Math, students will continue with our fractions unit. We will work on converting measurements and solving word problems. Our unit test will be next week. There will be math groups this Wednesday, 8:00-9:00.