Important Dates . . .
May 9 -- Happy Mother's Day, Moms!
May 10 -- 4th grade trip to Robert Crown
May 14 -- Early Dismissal
May 31 -- Memorial Day -- No School
Students from Project Challenge have started a fundraiser for the ASPCA, a foundation to stop animal cruelty. The kids will be selling "Smencils", (scented pencils), for $1.00 each. The pencils will be sold each morning in the grade level areas. The sales will start Friday, April 30th, and go through May 28th. We will track our sales on the bulletin board by the multi-purpose room. For every twenty dollars we raise, one food bowl will go up on the bulletin board. So please save our animals. Buy Smencils.
Language Arts
The students are continuing to work on handwriting and good main idea sentences this week. They will continue building on writing grammatically correct sentences that relate to the topic given. We will also work on creating a poem this week using Co-Writer.
Reading
Your child will be coming home with 7 words from lesson 132 of the Elements of Reading Vocabulary program that will be studied during the week in class and should be reviewed at home. On the page I will be sending home each Monday there will be suggestions on how you can work with your child & have them get extra practice.
Each 20 minute increment read counts for a point up to 20 points – yes, that means an additional reading grade each month for learning to love to read. Your help is greatly appreciated! Please sign on the date the reading was accomplished. This orange folder should be turned in every Monday to make sure they are staying on track.
Spelling
This week we will continue to be divided into different spelling groups. Some will be working on Unit 33 this week. Others will be working on an animal list, where science, reading and spelling skills will be built at the same time through this list.
Practice pages will be assigned for the upcoming week's list on Friday to give additional study time. Over the weekend would be a good time to discuss the meaning of the words. Although we work on meaning typically on Fridays and Mondays, help from home is greatly encouraged! They will be receiving them daily as an assignment. A test over the lesson will be given every Friday. Please try to help your child study if you see they are not performing as well as you'd expect on the weekly test.
One strategy you can use to help is utilizing this website: http://www.spellingcity.com/ Students can learn spelling words, practice spelling tests, and play fun spelling games.
Science
There is a lot of information to know in Chapter 2, Animals. The "Big Idea" of this chapter is there are many kinds of animals. Animals can be grouped by their traits. The children have finished the first lesson, Mammals and Birds. Each child has a lot to share of their knowledge about animals. I would like them to be able to not only be interested in the animals discussed, but to know the characteristics of each animal group and how they differ by specific traits. This week we will be moving on to the Lesson 2, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fish.
Math (Mrs. K's Math class only)
Instead of adding on the value of quarters, the class spent more time focusing on adding just pennies, nickels, and dimes last week. So, this week we will continue working on the value of coins, and more specifically adding the value of a quarter. Then, we will be adding the penny, nickel, dime, and quarter all together. The children will be encouraged to use Touch Math to solve the values of the coins presented.
Daily Homework
Reading- 20 minutes and fill in Independent Reading Folder Log due every Monday
- students should practice reading poem nightly to parents to work on fluency
- study lesson 13 vocabulary words
Spelling- Practice Page nightly & study words with parents nightly
*Please check your child's homework and sign assignment notebook when complete.
**If your child is having difficulties with their homework please send a note and I will help them during free time
