September 29-October 3

This week in Writing, students will review verb tenses and irregular verbs (verbs that are spelled differently when written in past tense).  We will use this information to work on subject verb agreement next week.  As a Writing Strategy, students are going to reread their notebook entries and highlight or underline words or phrases that they could write more about, or create an entirely new piece of writing from.  This strategy is known as "Lifting a Line".  It can become very interesting when we take these words or phrases and create new writing pieces with them!

In Reading, students will begin small group Literature Circles.  The students have been grouped according to their reading levels and they will meet with this small group every 4 days.  We have chosen a book that is on their reading level that we will read in small groups and complete "jobs" while reading.  These are the same reading jobs that the students worked on earlier this year.  Our goal is to work on strategies that meet each group's individual needs, as well as keeping them reading!  As a whole class, students will work on finding details and the main idea while reading.  We will use several strategies to help students with this.  It isn't as easy as it sounds!  But don't worry, we will continue to work on this throughout the year with many types of texts.  

This week in Math we are starting a new unit. We will begin with looking at multiplication and different ways to use drawings/arrays to represent those equations. This helps them visually make sense of multiplication. There will be math homework every day this week except for Friday.

In Science this week we will finish up the last chapter in the unit and begin to prepare for the test NEXT Tuesday, October 7. We have covered the states of matter, measurement and will finish the chapter up with density this week. They will have 3 study guides that we have completed to use to study and will also be able to bring home their science books.

In Spelling this week we will start with a new word list. These words help us to learn the rules of the long/short /i/ sound and the different ways to make the /k/ sound. The word lists will come home tonight. There will be another parent/student activity on Thursday night and a test on Friday. It was great to see how many of you worked with your student on the last parent/student, spelling activity. We appreciated your support at home!