October News

Dates to Remember


School-to-Home Connection

We have been coming together wonderfully as a classroom community! We work daily on treating one another with kindness and respect, as well as how to be safe and responsible. 

This month

Please help your child keep up the great work with their homework!  NOTE - We are jumping from 15 minutes of nightly reading to 20 minutes during the month of October.

Thank you for helping your child stay organized. As a reminder, your child should be coming to and from each day with: 

Ask your child what they think of the characters in books they are reading, or characters from movies or TV. Ask them to give specific evidence to support what they think about a character. Ask them about the lesson or message or theme of a book or TV show.  Share your favorite books and characters with your child.  Seeing adults as readers is a wonderful way to help children see the value and importance of reading.

Ask your child about the story they are composing in workshop. They have created a story arc, and are working bit by bit to compose, revise, and edit their writing. We will have "published" stories before the end of the month!

We just wrapped up our Math unit on the structure of large numbers. Test your child to see if they can round numbers you see out in the world to the nearest hundred or thousand! Ask them to show you how we can add or subtract both on an open number line AND using the standard algorithm. We will be moving into a 5 week unit on multiplication next...

We are well underway in our Science unit focusing on energy. Ask your child about potential and kinetic energy, along with balanced and unbalanced forces! Next up: friction, gravity, and Newton's three laws!

Classroom Update

Reading: 

This month we will focus on our Character Unit.  In this unit your child will learn how to accurately describe characters using evidence from the text as well as build theories about a character while thinking about their motivations and struggles.  In addition, they will find evidence to support the theme (big message) of the text.  

Writing: 

This month your children will draft, revise, edit and publish a Realistic Fiction piece of writing.  Students created their characters and "story arcs" (list of scenes) and are beginning to draft their scenes. We will work to write well written leads and endings as well as work to improve how we elaborate our writing while developing the most important part (heart) of the story. We are adding dialogue and onomatopoeia!

Math:  

Last month we studied place value and looked at how numbers can be composed (put together) and decomposed (broken apart) using the Base 10 number system.  This putting together and breaking apart numbers is an important skill that will be used throughout the entire year.  Students have worked on how to round numbers, as well as explored ways to add and subtract large numbers. We are moving into a 5 week unit on Multiplication, with a focus on Area Model. A "Family Letter" about this unit just went home.

Science

This month we continue our first science unit.  This unit is call Energy is Everywhere.  The unit begins with defining energy and analyzing types of energy. Through exploration and hands on activities students will develop a deeper understanding of the conservation of energy and energy transfer. Through experimentation they come to understand the meaning behind Newton's Three Laws of Motion. Ultimately they utilize their knowledge of force and motion through an Engineering Design Task (Catapults).