Updates and announcements

I hope everyone had a restful weekend! We have had family in town for Paul’s last doctoral recital. While it has been wonderful, we are excited to have our quiet house back to ourselves.

Great Hearts Day is this Thursday. We are doing some short teambuilding activities in the afternoon, so we are not in need of any volunteers. It will be a very small classroom event. Please note that we do not hand out store-bought Valentines on this day. Most of the day is spent on academics.

On Thursday, we will be eating lunch with our second grade buddy class and our fifth graders will lead small Socratic discussions on friendship.

Our week in learning

This week, students will learn about the idiom “Tom, Dick, and Harry”.

Students will learn about the roots nonus, decimus, and electron. They will be quizzed on these roots next week. Students should expect a similar quiz every week over the previous week’s roots.

In Literature, we will continue reading “The Secret Garden”. We will continue reading through chapter 19. Students will have a journal entry about every two days. If you have not already done so, please send in a physical copy of “The Secret Garden”.

In Writing and Grammar, students will classify prompts and thesis statements as opinion/persuasive or informative/explanatory. We will also begin formal practice on outlining passages, then using the outline to create an essay outline that aligns with a prompt. Students will do the majority of work in class and the homework will be to finish the classwork assignment.

Students will continue their study of flowering plants and pollination this week, culminating in a plant dissection on Friday! Students will have the opportunity to apply what they have learned about plant anatomy to real plants. There will be a short quiz over parts of the flower on Monday.

This week in History, students will nearly finish our unit on Westward Expansion Before the Civil War. They will understand the various adaptations of transportation that took place, the idea of America’s Manifest Destiny behind their westward march, and the accumulation and exploration of territories such as Texas and the Oregon territory. Students were given study guides for the unit on Thursday, February 7^th. These will be due on Thursday, February 21^st, with the test on Friday, February 22^nd.

In math, we will start a short unit on measures and volumes. Students will convert decimal units into larger and smaller units, and find the volume of rectangular prisms. ALL workbook homework assignments will be half of every type of problem. There will be no math groups this week. Math groups will be sparse this quarter due to AZMerit preparations.