Week 20: Algebra Continues, Historical Fiction, and Environments

Welcome to Week 20!  Thank you for taking the time to meet with us this past week.  We truly enjoyed talking with each of you about your students growth this year.  Please remember, this Friday is a staff inservice day.  No school for the kids..but plenty of meetings for us teachers.

Here's the week:

In math we will be concluding our first algebra unit.  The students have take this intense topic and done relatively well.  This week students will be working with the order of operations and using reasoning skills to find algebraic expressions.  We will be completing some peer instruction as well as our end of topic test on Thursday. 

In reading this week we are going to continue to work on inferring using our historical fiction novels. Inferring is using background knowledge and text clues to make a decision, answer a question or understand what is read.  It is important that students are including both background knowledge and text evidence in their answers when working on their comprehension packets. Being able to support an answer with evidence is a skill they will use throughout the curriculum.  Please also continue to stress the importance of writing in complete sentences with proper capitalization and punctuation.

In writing we are working on how to write a strong paragraph.  A good paragraph will have a topic sentence, supporting sentences and a concluding sentence. Paragraphs also need to be about one topic.  We are practicing this skill by writing a personal narrative.  (A personal narrative is a story about oneself) Their narratives will be only three paragraphs long. So far they have turned in their introduction paragraph and have received them back with comments from Mrs. Therriault. This weekend they are writing their body paragraphs which need to be turned in Monday morning. 

In science we will be practicing writing up science investigations.  Specifically, students will be practicing writing hypotheses and procedures as if they were completing an investigation.  These skills are tested heavily on the 5th grade science MSP so we will spend a lot of time practicing, talking about what we were thinking, and discussing what a strong investigation should look like.  In addition, we will continue to observe the two plant oriented investigations that we started last week. 

That's it for now.  Please be on the lookout for a survey and questionaire coming home this week with your weekly eval.

Thanks,

Allyn and Alaina