I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! The winter holidays will soon be upon us, so I hope your children are gearing up for a whirlwind 3 weeks before our Winter Break! We were so proud to have won the WalkAround trophy for most money raised in the 4th and 5th grade classes - thank you for your great support of our school and your children! Here are some of the things we are working on:
In language arts, we are almost at an end to our "Nanowrimo" novel-writing experiences! Most of the students have had alot of fun writing their novels and improving their writing skills. During the month of December, we will work on revising and editing our novels before they are published. Hopefully, all students will be able to reach their word count goals! We will have a special party next week to celebrate our long, hard work in completing the novels! Over the next few weeks, we will be reading selections from our reading textbook and also working on summary writing.
In math, students are speeding through our math curriculum. I am very lucky to have such a bright group of children who learn so quickly and are able to master new concepts easily. For the fifth graders, we are now working on decimals (multiplication and division) while the 4th graders are working on long division with 3-digit dividends. Interspersed with these lessons, we also work on problem-solving tasks (MARS, Problem of the Month). Next Saturday, Mrs. Kamath and I will attend a math conference down in Monterey in order to refresh our own math repertory. We hope to use some of the lessons from the conference with our students the following week!
We will embark this week on a new Science Unit for 4th grade - The Solid Earth- which reviews rocks and minerals and properties of the earth. 5th graders will begin "The Water Planet" which will include astronomy, the planets, and other concepts. On Friday, 4th grader will bring home their science notebook from our first unit "Environments", so be sure to put it somewhere safe so that they can review it in 5th grade before the STAR science test, which covers science concepts studied in both 4th and 5th grade.
The Holiday book fair will run all week long in our GLC - students will be allowed to shop at recess and lunch time. If you send money to school with your child, be sure they keep it some where safe so that they don't lose the money. The book fair will also be held next Sat., 12/3 for adult holiday shoppers!
Finally, we have begun a pen pal correspondence with high school students from Lynbrook - the class was very excited to receive their first letters from their new pen pals this month! We have almost completed our response letters and will be sending them off this week. We hope to meet our pen pals at the end of the school year as well!
No comments:
Post a Comment