WEEK of SEPTEMBER 26- 30

CONTACTING ME: You may contact me by calling the middle school or by email. lblowers@hamiltonschools.us  If we need to talk at length on the phone, I will generally call after school or in the evening. My cell is a 231 area code so if you see that, it could be me.  
SNACKS: Please send a snack with your child each day. Many students are not bringing one with them and 3-4 hours since breakfast is a long time!  JRT - Just Right Time (This is like RTI)

JRT begins next week. Monday/Thursday is Reading JRT and Tuesday/Friday is Math. Students have been assigned teachers based on need in reading and math and will be going to class with those teachers after lunch from 11:25-12:00.

HOMEWORK:

Math: 6 review problems. (It says page 17 at the bottom)

Reading a minimum of 20 minutes each day is always Homework
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 MATH:   
  We are reviewing all concepts.  The test over adding and subtracting fractions will be the week of October 10. Students took a quiz on Friday which is in Powerschool- this does not count toward a grade, but is a way for students to see what concepts they need to focus on. We will be working in groups that need same concept assistance. I highly encourage your child to use the resources on the MATH tab of the blog when doing homework or just for extra practice. 

* Not knowing their math facts is part of what is causing some issues for kids. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing incorrectly will mess up the entire problem even when showing they know how to perform the concept. 

  LANGUAGE ARTS 
Writing: This week we completed the revising and editing of Camp Manitou paragraphs. The focus was on writing a paragraph, using complete sentences, and practicing revising and editing. We also wrote captions (memes) for animal photographs. We were trying to use precise language, meaningful punctuation, and practice moving photographs from a source to a google Doc. I will create an interactive flippable book with student work and send it to you next week. 

We will write an opinion piece next week.

READING:

Students read an article on their own and are using strategies we have discussed to find information to answer text questions, find the details to fit the main idea, and figure out unknown vocabulary. Next week we will use some fiction picture books to practice making inferences. An inference is where we use text clues + our background knowledge to read between the lines or make an educated guess about what the author is saying.

We have been working primarily in a large group learning/practicing strategies as well as working in pairs at this point.

SCIENCE  
We completed our lesson 1 investigation of motion working in groups to design an obstacle course that will cause a marble to go the SLOWEST possible from one of the table to the other. Students designed, tested, discussed problems and redesigned.  We held our competition and discussed factors that positively/negatively affected outcomes. There are 4 photos in the PHOTOS TAB. 
 Next week we will perform investigations for finding speed of an object. Study Stacks for vocabulary is in the their Google Classroom.

 Social Studies:

This week we started on our second unit, including the Bering Strait Land Bridge Migration Theory and early Native Americans.  We are reading chapter 2 in our textbook and creating a Rip Book to record our new vocabulary terms.  This will most likely be due on Thursday. Friday the kids got back their first social studies quiz.  It covered the 3 branches of government.

Word Study
We took the Lesson 3 test Friday. These will come home on Monday and scores are in PowerSchool. Our next skill is spelling words with silent letters. The word list is in the SPELLING Tab.

We also studied action verbs, helping verbs and linking verbs. We will continue to practice nouns and verbs with classroom activities, games, and online practice.