Week of March 28th

Hi everyone!

We are back in the swing of things at school. It's been a little slow going as we get back to our routine. We have begun working on summarzing as our new reading strategy. We have discussed the purpose of summarizing, looked at different summaries, and we will begin writing summaries for books next week.  Students continue their efforts with Independent Daily Reading and we have move our nightly reading to 30 minutes.

In writing we are revisiting poetry.  Take a look at your child's Writer's Notebook on nights it comes home for homework to see their experimentation with this genre.  They are well engaged and we are learning a number of elements of craft through this genre.  Soon we will move into Persuasive Writing as our main genre for the Spring.

Geometry is our focus in mathematics.  We have worked with geoboards to give a concrete experience of area and perimeter.  Students are working with area of triangles at present and they have learned different methods to solve trianglar area problems.  Our next stop will be with Parellelograms and Quadrilaterals and then we will move into angles and triangle classification.  Geometryhas been a nice break from number crunching.

After concluding our study of the American Revolution, students began looking at how the government of our nation was formed.  We will look at: the goals our Founding Fathers had for our country, explore the Constitution and basic structure of our government, checks and balances, and lastly, we'll look at other forms of goverment through current events.  We have a field trip to the Z on April 27th to see a presentation of We The People.  More information to follow.

I have backed off of checking that students are copying homework in their agendas.  The habit is well-engrained at this point so I am releasing more responsibility to them to copy their homework in the morning and let me know if there are any notes in their agendas for me.  So far students are following the routine as always. If you note any problems at home.

Happy Spring everyone!
Laura

March 28, 2011

Welcome back everyone!

I hope you all had an enjoyable Spring Break.  For your writing homework tonight, please reflect and tell me what you did during vacation. Some guiding questions:

1. Were you home for break? Did you travel?  Have any family time?
2. Was there something special you did over break?
3. Did you connect with family and friends?
4. Do you find yourelf relaxed and rejuvinated?

Field trip reflection homework

Friends,

Here are some guiding questions for your reflection homework if you need them:

• Which parts of the field trip did you enjoy?
• Which parts confirmed what you've learned about the American Revolution?
• What did you think about having the field trip at the end of our unit of study of the Revolution?  Would it have been better to go on the field trip earlier?
• What did you learn from the field trip?

Please remember to write in paragraphs and self-edit your work.  Stretch yourself BEYOND the bare minimum, please.

:)

Mrs. Velazquez