Important dates:
February 13 - Valentine's Party (20 Students - List of names to come)
February 16 - Presidents' Day
February 17 - No classes for students
Headphones - If you haven't yet, please send your child to school with headphones to help them focus on their digital activities. Thank you to everyone who has sent them!
Specials Classes - Our class will now have Music with Ms. Mahoney each afternoon. She can be reached at: mmahoney3@cps.edu .
Students are allowed and encouraged to bring bottles of water to school. In the classroom, students are only allowed to have water (no juice or soda). We have many spills throughout the year and cleanup can be difficult when we find that it isn't just water - especially when electronics are involved. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Student Wellness Good attendance is wonderful, but our health is much more important. If your child is experiencing symptoms of illness but will still attend classes, please send them in a mask to help protect their classmates from transmission of the various illnesses that tend to grow in numbers this time of year.
Student Uniform and Dress Down Days Students should come to school in uniform Monday through Friday. Proper uniform consists of navy blue pants/skirt/dress/collared shirt. Gray Edwards sweatshirts and t-shirts (when students have PE) are also allowed. Additionally, our classroom can get very cold so please provide your child with a navy blue sweater with no hood. Principal-approved dress down days will be announced ahead of time.
As always, please feel free to contact me via Remind with any questions you might have.
Unit 3 of our Second Step Program is all about "Empathy and Kindness." These activities are meant to help your child grow as a person as they navigate life.
The weekly lessons are: Kindness and Friendship, Building a Friendship, My Kind of Kindness, Asking Questions, and Do Something Kind.
With adult support, students will be able to Explain how empathy and kindness can build strong friendships and identify the types of kind acts that that can benefit others by thinking about what someone else might want or need.
Encourage your child to identify kind things they can do to build friendships.
Module 7, Make a Difference, asks this question:
How can one person make a meaningful difference in their local or global community?
Throughout this module, students will listen to, read, and view a variety of texts and media that present them with information about building communities.
A genre focus on narrative nonfiction provides students with opportunities to identify author's purpose, text structure, and text and graphic features in order to better understand unfamiliar texts. Students will also encounter historical nonfiction and video to build knowledge across genres.
As students build their vocabulary and synthesize topic knowledge, they will learn more about how a dedicated individual or group of people can help make a community stronger and better.
Performance Task: Students will work collaboratively to research people who have made a difference in their community in an award nomination ceremony.
scare, greenhouses, pollution, crowded, vats, vertical, factories
communal, fellowship, outreach, resident
Compound Words
Text Structure
Each day, from Monday through Thursday, students will be asked to complete one Choice Board activity for homework in their spelling notebooks. They can choose any activity they would like as long as it is different from the others they've chosen during that week.
Each week, students will receive a new spelling sort. These are words that we would normally be practicing (and tested on) in the classroom. Being able to correctly spell these words will be important as they develop as writers and students should practice every day.
Students have been assigned varying spelling sorts according to their ability.
There will be a test on Friday.
This Week - Students will have spelling homework on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Students should also have completed 5 times each and sentences for 10 of their words (classwork).
Essential Question: What strategies can we use to find area and perimeter?
Design a figure with an area and perimeter related to a real-world context.
Determine the area of figures.
Determine the perimeter of figures.
Use unit squares to cover a figure without gaps or overlaps.
Determine the area of figures by counting unit squares and other strategies.
Determine the area of figures on a grid.
Create figures on a grid with a given area.
Connect multiplication to area.
Write multiplication equations to represent area.
Apply the distributive property to solve for area.
Determine the unknown side when given the area of figures.
Connect multiplication to division.
Determine the unknown side when given the perimeter of figures.
Connect addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
Solve real world problems involving rectangles with the same area and different perimeter.
Solve real world problems involving rectangles with the same perimeter and different area.
Decompose rectilinear figures into non-overlapping rectangles
Determine the areas of rectilinear figures.
Solve area word problems with rectilinear figures.
Design a figure related to a real-world context and determine the area and perimeter.
*Students should also study multiplication and division facts independently throughout the year.
There is an astounding diversity of traits among organisms living in different environments on Earth. How do the traits of different organisms make them more likely or less likely to survive in their environments? What happens to organisms when their environment changes?
In the Environments and Survival unit, students assume the role of biomimicry engineers studying a population of grove snails to understand how the snails’ traits influence their survival in a changing environment. Students apply what they learn to plan, make, and test designs that solve problems. Reporting to the lead engineer at an engineering firm, students work to explain why the snails with yellow shells in the population aren’t surviving as well as the snails with banded shells.
Why?
Young people and adults have many misconceptions about the factors that affect the survival of organisms in their environment, particularly when an environment undergoes a change. While the understanding that animals have needs they must meet to survive is likely familiar to students, the critical roles of the environment and of the specific traits of organisms in influencing organisms’ survival are likely less familiar. In this unit, students examine different factors that make organisms more likely or less likely to survive: the ability of organisms to meet their needs in a given environment, how different traits make it easier or harder for specific organisms to survive in an environment, and how this pattern of survival changes when the environment changes.
In this unit, students explore the concept of community and place, and how they shape and define students’ own identities, including their racial, ethnic, cultural, environmental, personal, and community identities. They will investigate the physical and political features of geography in global, regional, and local contexts.