Important dates:
April 3 - No school 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 World Language with Mr. Lopez each afternoon until the end of the school year.
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 8, Imagine! Invent!, asks this question:
What does it take to make a successful invention?
Throughout this module, students will listen to, read, and view a variety of texts and media that present them with information about inventors and inventions.
A genre focus on 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 narrative poetry and opinion texts to build knowledge across genres.
As students build their vocabulary and synthesize topic knowledge, they will learn more about the way an idea, determination, support, and hard work can create an environment where anything is possible.
Performance Task: Students will work collaboratively to research how famous inventors worked to create an invention and then create a proposal for their own!
innovative, singles, visionary, compact, memorable, system
contraption, craze, quest, era, engineer, perplexed, dynamo, lingers, whirled, baffled
Reference Sources: dictionary/thesaurus
*Repeat of before-break words
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 - Wednesday. Students should also have completed 5 times each and sentences for 10 of their words (classwork).
Essential Question: How can the smaller parts of a whole be represented, compared, and combined to make new fractions?
Partition shapes into equal areas and label the areas with unit fractions.
Label partitioned shapes using word names and fraction notation.
Write a fraction with fraction notation.
Explain the meaning of a fraction and its numerator and denominator.
Identify fractions for shapes partitioned into halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and eighths.
Recognize when the areas of partitioned shapes are equivalent.
Express the area of partitioned shapes using fractions including fractions greater than one or mixed numbers.
Identify the whole of a fraction.
Examine and compare fractions that have different size wholes.
Describe how different sized wholes affect the size of a fraction.
Partition number lines into equal intervals and label the intervals with fractions.
Understand halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and eighths as numbers.
Represent halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and eighths on number lines.
Recognize when fractions on number lines are equivalent.
Measure length using whole, half, and/or quarter units.
Make a line plot with a horizontal scale marked off in whole number, halves, and quarters.
Represent halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and eighths using models.
Use models to recognize when fractions are equivalent.
Represent halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, and eighths using models.
Use models to generate equivalent fractions.
Represent 1 as a fraction.
Use equivalent fractions to describe one whole.
Represent whole numbers as fractions.
Recognize fractions that are equivalent to whole numbers.
Compare two fractions with the same denominator or the same numerator using visual fraction models and reasoning about their size.
Record the results of comparisons with the symbols >, =, or
Compare two fractions with the same denominator or numerator by using visual fraction models and reasoning about their size.
*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.