Last Week of January

     Star Lab was a huge hit! The students worked hard and learned a lot about the constellations and the effect our Earth's rotation has on the seasons. It warms my heart when so many students come into school and tell me about the constellations they spotted in the night sky.
    The Science Fair is coming; I encourage you all to participate. If I can be of any help please don't hesitate to contact me. Our current events for February are optional. Students should sign-up for a date of their choice by this Thursday. I will send home a finalized copy of the schedule by the end of the week.
    With Valentine's Day right around the corner I will send home a letter detailing our class party and a class list to address Valentine's Day cards. Finally, we will have our class compliment party on Friday. Students are allowed to wear pajamas to school. I will take care of the treats!

Reading Workshop
      We will continue to work on our Mystery unit. We are reading a mystery together as a whole class. It is from the Calendar Club Mystery series. The students are so excited and very motivated.

Writing Workshop
     Last week we made booklets and began to develop our chapters. We are using what we know about the structure of informational texts and our topics to make smart decisions about the way we are organizing our chapters. This will be a very large writing project that will consist of multiple chapters, paragraphs, and pages. We will work on it bit by bit while looking at model texts to help inspire and motivate us.

Math
    This week we will continue to work on division. We are applying what we know about the concept of division and relating it to multiplication. We will also use our multiplication facts to help us solve division problems without the use of counters to help us. Continue to practice those facts at home, they help us solve our division problems with minimal frustration. For the third week in a row everyone scored a 100% on their fact quiz (this has never happened to me before!!!). This week everyone will take x9. Thank you all so much for the work you are doing at home. We are also working on Area this week.

Science
     We will begin a new unit in Science this week. We will be learning about the Solar System. This is a natural progression from our Star Lab work over the last three weeks. We will be learning about the planets, the sun, asteroids, meteors, etc. This is a research unit. The students will use computers and print resources to research aspects of each planet. They will also be responsible for completing a project on a planet of their choice at the end of the unit. Most of this work will be done in school!

   I am looking forward to another wonderful week of school. I have noticed a real change in your children over the last few weeks. They are growing, learning, and developing some wonderful work habits. Sitting in an assembly last week, another teacher in the building commented on what a change they have seen in your children and she commented on how much more mature they seem. BRAVO!!

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!