WEEK OF FEBRUARY 18- FEBRUARY 22

Friday, March 1.......................................No School- Records Day
Monday, March  4...................................Ned Show Assembly
Monday/Tuesday, March 4th/5th .........CONFERENCES
Friday March 8.............................Half day of school- Dismissal is at 11:40-no lunch
Saturday, March 16 ....................Everything For Kids Sale 9:00-2:00
Monday March 18....................... PTO Meeting

 FEBRUARY BOOK PROJECT: students began their iMovies in Infotech on Thursday, will complete them next week and then present. They should then post them to their websites.

Math: We tested Friday over our first fractions unit. These skills will continue to be practiced and used in our current unit, fraction operations. The test for this will likely be the week of March 4th- I will keep you posted. We continue to review multiplying and dividing larger numbers. 
 *It would be helpful to have your child practice a few of these each week! They will continue to be tested on these concepts into middle school.
Multiply: 3 digits by 2 digits such as 457 x 23. 
Divide: 4 digits by 2 digits such as 6504 divide by 25.
  
Students are noticing that knowing math facts is increasingly helpful in the fractions units! This will continue to be very necessary from here on out in math as multiple operations are being used within concepts.

READING: We wrapped up Book Clubs this week. Students are finishing up a short project Monday, we will share them, and move on to our last genre unit, The Fighting Ground. I will also be adding in non-fiction material.




MONTHLY BOOK PROJECTS: 
 I will be giving students a new book project for March soon. It will involve non-fiction texts. I will send home details about this later.  
 It is important for your child to be reading at home frequently, something I know you hear every year. We often get focused on chapter books as kids get older. But shorter or lengthier non-fiction material including biographies, news articles, magazines, and other informational materials about a variety of subjects are also important as students are learning to read for information. So have your child tell you about topics they are interested in and read up on it from numerous sources!

 
WRITING:   Students are working on drafts for their biographies. We had some discussion about how to incorporate parts of their plans into various paragraphs where they best fit- this can be tough! For example: In which paragraph would the quotes they found fit best? Should you have a paragraph about interesting facts or try to incorporate them into other paragraphs where they may fit? What if you have one that doesn't work anywhere? How do we make it fit seamlessly somewhere?


SCIENCE:  We reviewed kinds of forces and measuring forces. I showed the students a video clip about Newton's first law of motion: Part 1: an object in motion will stay in motion at the same speed and direction until an outside force acts on it. Part 2: an object at rest stays at rest unless a force acts on it. We demonstrated this ourselves. Students then performed an investigation with a piece of track and a marble to show whether the marble adheres to Newton's Law. We will revisit this next week to put it all together. We have been doing a lot of putting the definitions and concepts into our own words and acting them out so they make sense. We also discuss how these concepts are applied to our daily lives all of the time!

Spelling: Students completed Test 18. I will have these at conferences. Test 19 is Thursday- students received the list last Monday.

Have a great weekend!
Laura Blowers