Post date: Nov 1, 2011 11:05:47 PM
Better late than never... It was great seeing so many of you at the Fall Carnival this weekend. Thank you to everyone that participated in one way or another to continue to help raise money for the school. What a great turn out!
I did get wet a number of times in the splash tank... even from some of our students.
As mentinoned in a number of emails sent out this week, we have talked a bit more about the class play and packets were sent home this week. Auditions are on Wednesday and Thursday of this week.
Do note that Student Council's Stuffed Animal Day will be on Friday this week.
Please remember that there is no school on Friday, November 11 for Veterans' Day.
Math
We continue to work on algebra! Now, we are working with function tables. As we work with function tables, we will continue to work with coordinate planes (which we have explored during station time. There is a natural connection between the two, as y=x+3 and similar type of equations can be plotted by making a function table, listing the points, plotting the points, and connecting them to form a line. As students continue to work on this chapter, we continue to stress the importance of following that order of operations...
Just today, some students made the following error with this rule... 6 + 5b. They wanted to do addition before the multiplication. 6 + 5 x b ... when b is 3... the output will be 6 + 5 x 3 ... which is NOT 11 x 3... It is 6 + 15... which evaluates to 21.
After this chapter, we will be moving on towards multiplication. We contnue to work with our basic facts in a variety of ways. (Ipads, Math Facts in a Flash, and Flashmasters)
Language Arts
Students continue to work with identifying and using parts of speech. We have been learning about prepositions and prepositional phrases and how to utilize them. We even during a special Halloween Stations activities worked with mad libs... and made some special Halloween sentences.
The HM language arts program continues to have us work with nouns and in particular, proper nouns. Other skills learned within this theme included more with dictionary entry words and identifying the different parts of a dictionary entry including part of speech, meanings, sample sentences, pronunciantion, and more.
We worked on a write up for our memory books for Halloween. In addition, we are wrapping up with our Sacramento field trip writing. We stressed the importance of good organization and making that connection between the organizing portion of our writing to the rough drafts to our final copy.
Science
Please note that students do have the science vocabulary and outline sheets. We have finished through lesson 2 of chapter 2. Within lab today, we worked on the "Crowded Ecosystems" lab... which involved paper clips. Heather Farms will be visiting us on Tuesday for a workshop, Keystone Species which will help us understand this concept of ecosystems. Science test will be on Thursday, November 17.
Social Studies
Social studies outlines will be handed towards the later part of this week. The Social Studies test will be on December 1. There will be a Native American Choice menu that will be going home shortly. These projects will be due by Friday, December 2. More details will be coming home attached to this week's weekly update.
Students did give map motif speeches this past week. Feedback was attached to the updates. Map motifs are now on display in the B-pod hallway. What great projects. Grades for the actual project will be attached to this next week's update.