Week in Review: January 6-9

Happy New Year! We've kicked off 2015 with a great first week back! In science, students are working in small groups to study either earthquakes, landslides, or volcanoes. They will create a presentation to share their knowledge with the rest of the class next week.

We began a poetry unit in Language Arts, and over the next few weeks, students will be exploring all types of poems. They will even be writing several of their own poems! We began the week with a discussion of the features of poetry, after students had the opportunity to read many different types of poems.We focused on free verse poems towards the end of this week (poems that follow no set rhyming / rhythm scheme, and no punctuation rules). For one activity, students rotated around the room reading 5 different poems and jotting their thinking down on sticky notes. We then spent some time as a class discussing each poem and their thoughts.

To wrap up the week, students used "Monarch Butterfly" as a model to write their own free verse poem from the point of view of an animal or object.

In math, we are delving into fractions, and they seem to be doing well with this so far. We spent two days rotating through 4 stations, where students used manipulatives such as fraction circles, folded paper rectangles, pattern blocks, and fraction bars to explore equivalent fractions. It will get more challenging next week, as we discuss fractions as a set.

Next week, we will back into the regular homework routine. On Monday, your child will come home with a Bingo sheet, a math worksheet, and a spelling list. You will notice that the spelling list looks a little different, but they will still have 15 words as always.

Have a great weekend!