Happy Friday everyone!
We started this week with a fabulous Community Meeting reminding us of why we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I hope as we all enjoy our long and restful weekend we can reflect on the many freedoms we have due to people like Dr. King who have been leaders our country to build communities for change! We finished our class read aloud Mustaches for Maddie this week. We all wore mustaches to celebrate Maddie's resilience and her lessons of kindness. We are so excited because the authors have committed to skype with us, hoping to get it on our schedule next week! It will be great to hear more about Maddie and other books they have written! The class has now begun Mr. Terupt Falls Again the sequel to Because of Mr. Terupt. Be sure to ask your child about these books. What do they think about the characters? What lessons are the authors trying to convey? We are also continuing to work on the Fiction Signposts. This week we took a look at "Again and Again". When an author repeats words or phrases we shop stop and ask ourselves "Why does this keep showing up?" "Why is the author trying to stress this?" All students decided to read The War That Saved My Life as their historical fiction book. So we are using this book to dig into the signposts and also work on chapter summaries to get us ready for summer reading for Middle School. I can't wait to hear students discussing this book tomorrow! I love that they are begging to read more. They initially set 4 chapters as the week's goal, but then asked if we could extend to 6, and then some even wanted more! Going forward students will be working with a partner to set their weekly goals for discussion. In this week's Friday folder you will find a book order form as well as the information about ordering yearbooks. There are some FABULOUS books in this month's order. A few I would highlight :Song for a Whale, What was the Berlin Wall? , How Full is Your Bucket?, Inside Out and Back Again, Lousiana's Way Home, Notorious, The Friendship War, Other Words for Home and Terri Libsenson Trio (graphic novel set - dealing with friends, frenemies and feeling left out) to name a few. Orders are due by Friday, January 24th (next Friday). Students have been doing a great job with fractions this week. We are working hard adding and subtracting with like denominators. We have also worked with converting mixed to improper and improper to mixed. Next week our focus will continue to work at adding and subtracting, but we will need to find common denominators to solve next week's problems! In Science, we dug into what causes the amount of daylight in different parts of the world as well as how are shadows change throughout the day. The Earth's rotation and tilt on its axis really impact our lives. We talked about how different our lives would be if we lived along the Equator where their days always have about 12 hours. They don't see the longer days in the summer as we do, ask your child about this! We are working hard on our Narratives, hoping to finish up on the next week or so, and then we will celebrate our hard work with another writing celebration! Stay tuned for details! As a class, we have been overly chatty since we returned from break, and we needed to have a class meeting to hit the "reset" button. We are working on a class goal of "WORKING TOGETHER". Our focus is on being kind to EVERY student in our class, realizing that we all have different strengths and weaknesses, and we need to celebrate our differences rather than use them to separate us. We discussed we don't have to always LOVE all of our classmates, but we do need to like and respect each other. I will be holding them very accountable for this as we seek to refocus for a strong end to the school year! They are great kids and need to celebrate each other more instead of teasing, which sometimes has led to hurt feelings! Thank you as always for all of the support from home! Have a wonderful, restful long weekend! Maura Important Dates to Remember
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March 2020
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