READING: Students have been reviewing various reading comprehension skills including cause and effect, main idea and supporting details, and inferencing. Students had a chance to put their comprehension skills to test by retaking the STARS online test. It was exciting to see how many students progressed with their reading skills.
How you can help at home: This week we are learning about fact vs. opinion. Look for opportunities to introduce fact vs opinion into conversation. For example, the statement weathermen have been talking about cold weather all week is a fact. I love snow expresses an opinion.
The November/December book project on trading cards is due Friday. Your child should be finished reading a fantasy book of his or her choice and onto the writing portion of the project, making trading cards. Be sure to use the checklist to make sure that each card contains all the necessary descriptions. When necessary, use inferencing to make a logical guess. For example, #5 chose to make trading cards for CS Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. She guessed the White Witch was 6 feet since the book describes her as tall. Remember, the cards should reflect a month's worth of work.
WRITING: We've continued working with subjects and predicates of sentences. We've been paying close attention to subject-verb agreement and practicing proofreading our assignments for complete sentences.
MATH: We finished unit 7 on multiplication and division and then took a break from these operations for a mini-unit on quadrilaterals, lines, line segments, and measuring perimeters. We learned, for example, that a square is a special kind of rectangle that has four sides of equal length. A rectangle, in turn, is a special kind of parallelogram with four right angles (square corners.) A parallelogram is a special kind of quadrilateral with opposite parallel sides. So, a square can also be called a rectangle, a parallelogram, and a quadrilateral.
How you can help at home: Students took home a study sheet and a practice test for tomorrows unit test. Run over the definitions with them. This test is heavy in vocabularly and while students tend to have a sense of shapes, defining those shapes like a mathematician can be tricky.
SOCIAL STUDIES: We've been slowly learning the fifty states that make up the United States of America. We've been identifying key landmarks in one of five regions in the US. We learned how regions are defined by a common climate and physical geography. We also added some new post cards to our display and located each city by hemisphere, continent, and country.
How you can help at home: Encourage your child to identify familiar places by identifying the hemisphere, continent, and country. Encourage a few friends or relatives to send picture postcards from their corners of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment