December 14-18, 2015

General Announcements:

• This will be our last newsletter of the semester.  It has been a blessing to have all of your students in our classrooms and to be working with each family.  Have a wonderful holiday break!
• Please continue to collect Box Tops for our school.  Every box top equals money for our school!
• We will have holiday rotations on Thursday, December 17th, where students will rotate between all of the Discoverers classrooms. We will also enjoy treats on this day. Thank you to those of you that have already signed up to bring things in! We look forward to a wonderful day!

• Please check your child’s grades from time to time on INOW.  

Important Dates for This Week

• Thursday, December 17:  Holiday Rotations in the afternoon
• Friday, December 18:  Early Dismissal at 11:00 a.m. (let us know if your child needs a sack lunch)

Important Curriculum Dates

• Wednesday, December 16:  Reading Cold-Read Assessment
• Wednesday, December 16: End of Unit Test- Adding and Subtracting Fractions
• Friday, December 18:  End of the 2nd 9 weeks

Looking Ahead

• Monday, January 4th:  1st day back at school
• Wednesday, January 6th:  Report Cards

Curriculum News:

Math News:

**Math: We are finishing up our work with adding and subtracting fractions. We will continue this focus for the first week of January, and then we will move to our next unit in math. Generally speaking, I am very pleased with the progress we have made, and the students are showing me that they are able to apply their understanding of fractions when it is presented to them in a different way. After the break we will begin to work with adding and subtracting of decimals, and then revisit fractions when we learn to multiply and divide them.
homework: Math Computation

Science News:

**Science: We are about finished with our discussion of designing and testing ways to clean up environmental disasters, and will wrap it up with a hands-on experiment where we design our own air-filters. We will then test these filters to see how well they trap pollution, and help clean the incoming air. After the break, we will start to look at matter, chemical reactions, and space.
homework: None

Language Arts News:

Topics of Study -

**Reading-  We will have a cold-read assessment on Wednesday.  We will finish up our story from last week, "Stray," but there will not be vocabulary or a comprehension test this week.

**Language/Language IXL-  There will not be IXL or DOL this week.

Changes after the break with Reading Homework:

We will no longer have Reading Logs. I always go back and forth with this, because sometimes I feel like Reading Logs make them hate reading, but other times I think that it adds accountability. I told them I still want them reading as much as they can. I'm not setting a number of days or minutes, I just want them to READ and to ENJOY it. To hold them accountable for this, we are going to have an "In the Spotlight" moment on Fridays. Each Friday, I will pull names from a cup. If their name is pulled, they will be "In the Spotlight." At this time, they will talk to the class about the book they are reading. If they read more than one book, they can talk about just one of the books read that week. If they didn't finish the book, it is ok. They will just talk about the part that they read. I am still working on how to make this an EXCITING time for them, and to make them WANT to read so they can share what they read with the class. 

For their reading grade each week (for homework), they will be assigned ONE article to read online. After they read the article, they will answer questions about the article. The articles are geared towards kids and are interesting. The website is called Tween Tribune. I signed them up and will give them their log in information after the break. They will be assigned an article on Monday and it will be due on Thursday. This assignment will count as a 10 point homework grade each week. 

I'm looking forward to changing things up a bit. Please let me know if you have any questions. 

Stephanie

Social Studies:

Topics of Study – Before the break, students will complete a digital storytelling project on a cause of the American Revolution.  Details came home today.  Our in-depth study of the American Revolution will begin after our holiday break.  

                   

We hope everyone has a great week!