Updates and announcements

Our first week is down in the books! Our students are officially closer to being 6^th graders than 4^th graders. We will continue our school year with an emphasis on responsibility and time management.

The Daddy Daughter Dance is this Saturday.

Our week in learning

This week, students will take a short quiz over Indirect Objects on Wednesday.

They will begin the week in language arts researching their explorer using computers. Students will need at least one book source next week as they begin putting together their resources to form their essay. On Friday, students will create a sentence outline for their three body paragraphs, and should have their research largely completed by next Monday.

Students will read through chapter 10 of The Secret Garden and continue adding to their character charts and journal entries. Journal entries are assigned every chapter or every other chapter, and are expected to be a full paragraph in length (5-9 sentences). These will be collected for a complete grade at the end of the book, and should be neat, showing good effort, with complete sentences.

In science this week, students will continue taking notes on plant structure and adaptations. They will specifically focus on vascular and nonvascular plants. Students will be placed into groups and research a type of vascular or nonvascular plant to present to the rest of the class. All research and group work will be completed in class, and will be presented next week.

This week in history, students will continue to learn about the age of exploration. We will cover the questionable virtue of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish Conquistadors, how the connection between slavery and encomiendas, and Magellan’s voyage around the world. Please note that we will be covering slavery and the middle passage later in the unit. I encourage discussion at home on this sensitive topic.

In math this week, we will take a short quiz on our ratio unit, then move on to decimals. Students will learn about comparing, rounding, estimating, adding, subtracting and multiplying decimals. Graph paper is very helpful to line up decimals and keep their work organized. We will be using some in class, but it might be useful to have some at home to use with homework. There will be no math groups this week because we are starting a new unit, however we will start math groups next week, 1/24.