Updates and announcements

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a wonderful Spring Break. I spent mine cooking wonderful food, making a quilt for my brother’s graduation present, and cuddling with Cosmo and Gustav.

Check the Important Dates section for upcoming testing dates. Attendance is always important, especially now while we prepare to take the AZMerit in April.

Our week in learning

This week in Language Arts, students will review transition words and practice using appropriate transitions in their writing. They will also begin sentence stretching exercises to add details to their writing by answering the questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? And How? Finally, students will complete a writing workshop on Friday, spending the majority of the morning composing a full five-paragraph essay from beginning to end. Students will meet with a teacher briefly to help coach them in their writing skills.

In literature, please send in Across Five Aprils--students will begin their new literature selection this week!

This week in science, students will begin their anatomy unit by learning about the skeletal system. Students will label the different bones of the human body, be able to locate them on themselves, and will take notes on their different functions.

This week in history, students will continue learning about the Civil War. Students will be learning about the beginning of the Civil War, Fort Sumter, advantages and disadvantages of the North and South, military strategies, the reason why it was called a “Brother’s War”, the Peninsular Campaign, the battle of Antietam, and General McClellan. Please note that when students have a summary paragraph for homework, that should serve as their notes for that chapter.

In math this week, we will start our unit on data analysis. Students will identify mean, median and mode, and interpret histograms, line graphs, and pie charts. We will also begin our formal test prep for the AZMerit by working through targeted packets for bellwork. We will go over the bellwork at the start of each day. As we get closer to the test, we will transition to more test prep during the school day. Because we are starting a new unit today, there will be no math groups this week. We will start back up with math groups on 3/28.