Language Arts
We are so excited to be back after a restful and fun winter break. Everybody had a chance to share their wonderful stories and adventures. I was very pleased the see all of our students jump right into Spanish eagerly. Yay!!!
Some of the activities this week included:
- Review of classroom procedures
- Spelling work: homophones
- Spelling sentences (Please make sure your child practices their sentences for our quiz next Thursday)
- Oral language development: new year’s resolutions
- Oral language development: cause and effect situations
- Independent reading time
- Read aloud
- Word studies: Latin roots and prefixes
- Holiday writing sharing time!!!!
Science
“All living things depend on the conditions in their environment”
During this week, students were presented with a sneak peak of our new science unit: Environments. Students were assigned to read a book that introduces some of the concepts that we will be discussing these next couple of weeks, prior to our investigations. They will have the weekend to re-read and activate prior knowledge about this topic. Next week, as a class, we will talk about the main ideas of the book, vocabulary, key concepts and discuss how these connect to our new unit. We will also be going a for a little walk around the school next Thursday. Some of the objectives for our new science unit include:
- Develop an attitude of respect and understanding for life.
- Relate laboratory studies to the natural systems.
- Gain experience with the major environmental factors in terrestrial and aquatic systems.
- Determine an organism’s optimum conditions and environmental preferences.
Dear parents! Our class will be working on some projects that require the use of photographs and pictures of animals, plants and different environments and settings. Please check if you have old magazines that can be cut and used, such as National Geographic, etc. Thank you!
Art
The 4th and 5th graders started a drawing project this week in art. They used their own tennis shoes/boots as the subject matter for a realistic pencil sketch. They learned to sketch lightly, look for large basic shapes first, and then add detail. Although these drawings are not quite complete yet, I put them on the bulletin board in the hallway so you can see what an amazing job the students are doing! I’ll take them down for the students to continue working on them next week.