A Short Week With One More Trip Into StarLab

     If you have not yet signed up for a Parent/Teacher Conference and you would like one please click the following link and choose a time that works for you. If you would like a phone call during conference week just to check in, please email me and we can arrange a time.

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0945aaac2aa6ff2-winter

Math
     We are working on our first division unit. We have explored the concept of division and how it relates to subtraction and multiplication. This week we will continue this work and use fact families to divide by 2, 3, 4 and 5. We will also have our third fact quiz on Friday. Everyone in the class is on x10 this week!!! Please continue to practice at home. Having a quick fact recall really helps when solving division problems.
    The students will bring home their multiplication tests on Tuesday. Overall the scores were excellent. Our class average was a 92%! The most common mistakes were related to the Distributive Property. I will revisit this topic this week! This test is actually two tests combined (unit 5 and unit 6). We took these tests at two different times, weeks apart. Please sign the test, and return it to me by Friday.
   We are also working on Area of figures in class. You will see Area homework on Tuesday. It is important for students to label their answers!

Reading
    We had a lot of fun in reading last week. We started our Mystery unit! We played memory with some vocabulary terms for the unit and practiced our detective skills in a whole class setting. This week we will break into small groups and read longer mysteries. We will be detectives and identify the elements of the mystery while trying to solve the case! If you child is excited about this genre and you are looking for books to read at home try A-Z mysteries, Encyclopedia Brown, The Calendar Club Mysteries, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Jigsaw Jones Mysteries, Mystic Lighthouse Mysteries, The Boxcar Children, and Cam Jansen.

Writing
    Your children worked so hard in writing last week! We continued to draft our informational pieces while exploring different features we could use to make our work more interesting. This week we will look at the rubric that I will use to grade their pieces and make goals for revision.

Science
    StarLab has been such a huge hit!! Last week we learned about the "reasons for the seasons". I hope that you got a sense of what we learned in your child's Friday Letter. This week we will focus on The Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and the North Star.

Here we are using cubes to help us learn about division as equal sharing!