Week of December 3rd

Important Dates to Remember:

• Friday, November 30th: Half Day - Records Day
• Monday, December 3rd: Reading Logs Due
• Friday, December 21st: Winter Vacation begins - end of day 
• Wednesday, January 2nd: Return to School 

Here's the plan for the next two weeks...

Language Arts:  Over the course of the last few weeks, we have been spending a lot of time reading about what we're learning in Social Studies.  We'll be spending a little more time on inferring and then digging into theme a bit. Inferring is a higher level reading skill and has been easy when guided but can be difficult when kids read on their own.  How can you help at home?  When you're reading with your child at home, point out places where they can infer character emotions based on what they say or do.  I'm sending home a corrected reading assignment in Friday folders this week where kids did a lot of inferring.  We're working really hard and coming a long way!  

In Writing, we'll be wrapping up our Narrative writing soon and writing our final pieces.  Students will be expected to type their writing piece and they will be sharing it with their writing partner next week for some additional help with editing and revising.  We have a Writer's Cafe planned the week we return from Winter Break.  We'll be sipping hot chocolate, eating a snack and listening to students share one of their writing pieces.  They are looking forward to it! 

Math: We're making a lot of growth with our multiplication facts!  Knowledge of these facts have been making our Fractions unit much more manageable.  Keep up the good work here!  We've just started our Fractions unit and it's going quite well.  We tend to slow things down a bit in this unit because the groundwork we lay this year will be very helpful as your child moves to more difficult concepts in 5th grade. If there's anything you can do at home to make fractions more meaningful, please do so.  Cutting up food, talking about what each fractions means and also discussing equivalent fractions will really help a lot!  

Social Studies: We are just about finished with our Government unit.  We have been busy focusing on the purpose, levels, and types of government we have in the United States.  This week, the students participated in a simulation to help them learn more about our 3 branches.  All students were assigned to a different branch of government and were given many scenarios to help them learn more about the responsibilities each branch has and how they check on each other to ensure no branch has too much power.  We will be reviewing next week and the test will take place the week of December 10th.  

Science:  The kids are learning so much with our Magnetism and Electricity unit!  We have been creating electrical circuits using D-cell batteries, wires, light bulbs and small motors.  We recently solved "The String of Lights Problem." Students came up with a solution to the problem of keeping a strand of lights lit, when when bulb goes out by building the circuit in parallel instead a series circuit.  As them to tell you about it!  We are concluding the unit with a final assessment next week. A study guide will come home on Tuesday and the test will be on Thursday.  Our next unit of study is Motion and Design!