January 14- 18

Brrrrr!  I hope that at of you stayed warm this weekend.  What a drastic temperature drop!  Remember to make sure your children are dressed warmly.  As recess goes, as long as the wind chill is up, and it is above freezing, we will go outside.

This week in Math, we will continue to review two more units before moving on to a new concepts.  On Wednesday, we will begin a new lesson in dividing greater numbers.  Some students really had a grasp on division, so hopefully they retained all of the skills they needed to complete this lesson successfully.  On Thursday, we will work on the guess and check method, and Friday we will look at finding the better buy.

In Science, students will start looking at animals and how they feed, as well as cold blooded animals and how they survive.  Students will look at an animals instinct to camouflage itself in its habitat.  We will continue looking at animals with specialized structures that help them survive.

This week in Reading, we will dive into a new standard of reading works from other cultures.  This sounds rather challenging, but we think we have found a way to make it less so.  We will begin by reading Cinderella, the Walt Disney Version.  On Tuesday, we will read a Caribbean version known as Cendrillion.  We will then move on to reading a graphic novel of Cinderella.  We hope that the students will be able to use a familiar story to connect across the cultures of literature.  On Thursday, we will complete a Web Quest online about the story.  (See the link on the sidebar to play games at home!)  Another Common Core concept that we will hit is to compare books to movies.  On Friday, we will watch "Cinderella" while we compare it to the book.

In English Language Arts, students will take a look at writing with the three different author's purposes.  The purposes are to persuade, to inform, and to entertain.  Students are responsible for knowing how to recognize each purpose from a reading passage, and they must also be able to write from each purpose effectively.  We will study  a different purpose each day, and practice writing from it.

This week is RTI.  Our skill for this week happens to be Author's Purpose.  This allows us to take a deeper look as a reader, and how to determine the author's purpose.