One of our parents asked me a great question this week, and I thought some of you might be wondering the same thing, so I wanted to share her question and my answer with all of you :)
"How is my child doing in Language Arts? I haven't seen much coming home except spelling tests."
The reason that you don't see a lot of things come home is because we do most of our work in our Interactive Notebooks, which stay at school. I'm planning to share these with you at Parent-Teacher conferences. In our Interactive Notebooks we write Reading Response Letters, practice Reading skills and strategies, work on grammar and parts of speech, and practice Writing skills.
Some of the things that you should see coming home on a regular basis are from our daily Morning Work (this applies to 4th grade only). On Mondays we do an Idiom of the Week, Tuesdays is a prefix activity, Wednesdays is a suffix activity, and Thursdays we work on Mountain Language which addresses many grammar and language skills (we just started that last week). On Fridays we do our memory verse quiz.
Fifth grade will begin working on Mountain Language in another week or two. Over the next few weeks in my Monday Update, I'll highlight some of the Reading, Writing, and Grammar activities that we do to give you a better idea of what your child is working on in class.
I also wanted to give you an update on AR goals. We've had a couple of 'glitches' with our AR system, and have been trying get them resolved. I was able to access the goal calculator today, and will be sending emails tomorrow and Wednesday which will give you your child's AR goal. It's been adjusted to account for the fact that we started AR a little later than we'd planned. Your child can take AR tests even though the goals haven't been set. This won't interfere with their quiz results or points earned.
This week in...
Bible
We won't have a memory verse this week, as we'll being reviewing the verses learned during the first 5 weeks. We're continuing to talk about Peter and John healing the beggar at the temple gate. Today we talked about the Sanhedrin (the Jewish officials) and how angry they were that Peter and John had performed this miracle in the name of Jesus Christ. Because so many people had witnessed it, they couldn't deny what had happened, but they didn't want these 'Jesus followers' taking any of their power over the people. The Sanhedrin told Peter and John that they weren't to teach, preach, or do anything else in Jesus' name, but Peter replied that he would listen to the words of God, not the words of men. This got an "Ooohh...burn!!!" from the 4th graders who all agreed that we should place more importance on the word of God than the word of man. When we ended our Bible time today, several kids commented that they wish we had more time to spend talking about Bible...gotta love that!
Literacy
In Language, both 4th and 5th grade are reviewing nouns: common and proper, singular and plural, and possessive.
In Reading Skills the 4th graders are beginning a unit on text structures. Over the next two weeks we'll spend time learning about and practicing:
- putting events in chronological order
- comparing and contrasting
- determining cause and effect
- finding problem and solution relationships
The 5th graders are working on Asking Questions. We're talking about Thin and Thick questions (thin questions can be answered by finding the information right in the text, while thick questions require making some inferences). We'll practice identifying thick and thin quetions and generating our own. We'll also learn about asking questions before, during, and after reading and how that helps us understand our reading more deeply.
In Writing we'll be working on generating ideas for our writing over the next two weeks. We'll talk about where authors get their ideas and we'll make lists of our own for things like: everyday experiences, memories, favorite places, and special people.
Social Studies
In 4th grade we've started talking about the causes of the American Revolution. Some of your kids may have told you about the "email" that I read to them that outlined some changes that were going to happen at school. I told them that our administrators had decided that we were going to change our school day to 7am to 5pm. We wouldn't have anymore time for recess and would only get 10 minutes for lunch. We'd have no time to go on field trips and would need to do 4 hours of homework every night.
As you can imagine, they were outraged! I asked them to write letters to Mr. Tom and Ms. Tammy letting them know why they didn't agree with these ideas. They scribbled furiously as they grumbled to each other about how unfair this was, that they weren't going to have time for their after school activities, they would be tired all the time because they'd have to get up so early, and on, and on, and on.
After they'd written their letters, I let them know that none of these changes were actually going to happen, and asked for their forgiveness for misleading them (most of them forgave me...a few are still holding out!). I also told them that they now understood the feelings of the American colonists who were being told they would be taxed to help pay for a war that King George III had decided to fight with the French.
This week we'll talk about the many tax acts that were put into place that resulted in the colonists' eventual revolt against the crown. And believe me, your kids were riled up enough to revolt against MID when they thought all of these unfair changes were going to really happen!!!
In 5th grade we're starting our unit on Ancient Civilizations - Maya, Aztec, and Inca. We'll begin by getting familiar with the major landmarks of Central and South America. Then we'll hypothesize how we can learn about civilizations that no longer exist. After that we'll begin studying the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures, including the rise and fall of each civilization.
The 5th graders took their Geography test on Friday and most did really well on it. They'll do some self-corrections and then bring them home to be signed and returned to school. You should see them come home by Wednesday.
I hope to see you on Tuesday night at the PTO Meeting/Reading Night!
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