Updates and announcements
IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!!
We could not be more excited to continue cultivating a love of moral and
intellectual virtue.
A large focus of this week is
practicing procedures. We will be working through our expectations and
procedures document with the class. Students will bring this home to go over
with you as the parents and sign the back page, returning it by next Monday.
Our week in learning
This week, students will learn about the idiom
“Birthday Suit” and begin their Touchstones socratic discussions.
Students will also start learning Greek and Latin
roots, starting with canis, feles, and leon. Students will have a weekly quiz
over these roots next week. Students should expect a similar roots quiz every
Thursday.
In spalding, we will start with handwriting
practice and end the week by starting our first rule page on the silent final
e’s.
In Literature, we will review what happened in
Prince Caspian last year. Students should bring “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” by
Friday. We will focus on summaries and identifying and defining vocabulary
words from the chapter. Please note that not all classes will be in the same
part of the chapter every day, but should end the week on the same chapter.
In Writing and Grammar, students will take a 4th
grade grammar test to see where they are and start their notebooks with a table
of contents. We will review parts of a sentence and capitalization rules.
Students will also start “Outlining Wednesdays”, focusing on different passages
and skills with note taking every week.
In
our first week in science, students will begin their study of scientific
inquiry and the scientific method. We will start the week off by discussing why
inquiry is important by reading about the life of Galileo Galilei, and
discussing the basics of experimental science. Students will also learn how to
craft a strong hypothesis, and on Friday will get to test their skills as they
observe the “floating egg” experiment in class.
This week in history and geography students will be
reintroduced to basic world geography (7 continents and 5 oceans) and will
begin studying the major lakes of the world. The students will have 3 brief
quizzes on world lakes. These will only assess their ability to identify the
location and names of the lakes on a given map. On Wednesday students will be
quizzed on the location and names of major lakes of Africa, on Thursday the
major lakes of South America, on Friday the major lakes of North America.
On Thursday students will be given a study guide for their Unit 1: World Lakes test, which will be administered on Thursday, August 16th.
In
math, we will start by taking a 4th grade test to see where students are at and
identify any large apparent gaps from the summer. From there, we will start
with our first unit, Whole Numbers. We will work on expanded form, billions,
rounding and estimating. Please note that we will have frequent quizzes in
math. When a “b” quiz comes home for homework, that means there will likely be
a quiz the next day. This means there will be a very short quiz during the
first week of school.
