We have been working hard  these last few days to get all of our loose ends tied up before break. Next week will be a quick 4 days culminating in with our class Christmas Party! Next week we will be taking the final Math test on long division on Thursday. The snow day this week set us back a day. Hopefully, all of the students pass the practice test and we don’t have to give the final test at all.

This week in Reading Workshop students have continued to research their topics. We learned how to write about our research in a way that helps us to synthesize the information that we are learning. Students met with their groups today to plan out their posters and to begin to work on their individual part of the poster.

In Writing Workshop students are continuing to develop their personal essays. We wrote a mini-story that give an example for each of our reasons that supports our thesis. Students also learned how to create parallelism in lists as a powerful alternative to writing a mini-story. Yesterday we worked on writing introductions that hook our readers. We followed a recipe of Hook. Hook. Thesis, reason 1, reason 2, reason 3. Ask your child if they remember their hook.

Math this week was all about long division! Students learned how to use an area model to divide, how to use the partial products method to divide and today they learned the “old school” short cut. (This is the method you and I learned in school). Please ask your child to show you how all three methods work. We will be practicing one more day (Monday), before our practice TEST on Tuesday.

Students took their test for our Science unit Organisms in Their Environment on Thursday. I am hoping to have these graded and handed back before break. Students made vocabulary cards, and took home a review sheet to help them study for the test. We also played a few online Kahoot! games, with test like questions that covered the concepts taught, as part of our review. We will be starting our unit on the States of Matter after break.

A HUGE thank you to all that quickly donated raffle items for next Thursday! The students are super excited about the raffle!

Important Dates

December 23- January 2 – Winter Holiday Break

School Resumes – January 3