Week of October 14-October 18

 Monday Oct 21st................Conferences 

 Tuesday Oct 22nd.. ...........Conferences   

Wednesday Oct 23rd..........Hawkeye Hustle

 Thursday Oct 24th ...........No School

Friday Oct 25th..................No School

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FUSION PAGE   Mrs. Blowers Fusion Page

You can find fractions and other math links here as well as spelling, grammar, and sites for reading.

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Homework:  
Reading: Reading at least an average of 20 minutes at home most days of the week is homework all year.
 Math: Students have math homework due Monday.

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CONFERENCES: Your child is welcome and encouraged to come to conferences with you. They have worked on a presentation and written goals for themselves that they'll share.

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                         ** WEDNESDAY Oct. 23rd **                                        1st Annual Hamilton El. Walk-a-Thon…
                                  The Hawkeye Hustle
  We hope for this to be the only fundraiser this year. Please have donations in by Wednesday if you chose to participate.
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  Partnering with Mrs. Sikma's Class:
You can view some photos in the "Photos" tab of the blog.

Tuesday our class partnered with Mrs. Sikma's class to assist them with revising and editing their work during infotech. This is also helpful for our own class as we are also working on improving these skills.

   MATH:
  We continue working in our unit Adding and Subtracting Fractions. We have worked on adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators, equivalent fractions and finding the lowest common denominator, and add/subtract mixed numbers. We will continue to work on this into next week to strengthen these skills. We used pattern blocks and graph paper to show equivalent fractions and will keep working on this. Students can often do the "math" part of this but have a difficult time conceptualizing it in order to retain the concept.
 
READING
   Read aloud: We are reading and discussing Echohawk a novel about a boy's life as a Native American since being taken away from his "white" family as a child and living a Native American family as their son. It ties in with our Social Studies unit.

We began book club on Thursday. We will be working in small groups on reading comprehension strategies and groups will be meeting with me. 

WRITING:
 Students began researching their tribes for their reports this week using a minimum of 2 sources. We practiced writing notes and how to write these into a paragraph. They had the option of working with a partner or alone on this piece as well as a choice in how they want to present their report.

SPELLING:
  Students will took the Lesson 6 Word and Skill test on Monday. The skill for this week was the homophones their, there, and they're.
TESTS WILL NOW BE ON FRIDAYS: It doesn't work well in my schedule for Mondays.
Next week we will not have a test because of the short week, but will review some concepts.
If your child wants to play games/ practice tests, go to:
Spelling City  

SCIENCE: 
We have been studying balanced and unbalanced forces- we arm wrestled and played tug-of-war to show these concepts. We are now concentrating on simple machines and performing some investigations about these.