Language Arts / artes del lenguaje
What a busy week! We spent a lot of time working on science, although we had time to work on our literacy routines: spelling(dictado), word work, grammar, listening comprehension and independent reading time. Students took home a new book this week. Please make sure your child continues to practice their reading in Spanish on a daily basis.
Our theme this week was Las flores, and thanks to Connor and his beautiful family, the ending of the week could have not been more perfect. Thank you!. Please make sure you stop by and see our beautiful bulletin board. Students worked really hard on the spelling and vocabulary project of the song Las flores. Also, in connection to math (lines, segments, angles, triangles, etc.), students created wonderful art pieces!
We also had a small preview of our new literacy unit, Going West. We had a chance to preview vocabulary and do a listening comprehension activity of the story La caza del bufalo. We will be working on this story and digging into our new unit next week!
Science / ciencia
During science this week:
Research Project – Based on the science investigations covered during our Environments module this term, students choose an area of study , formulate a question and plan an investigation to answer it. Students selected a topic from our winter science module, Environments, to investigate in greater depth. The results of their project will be shared with the rest of the class in a formal presentation next week. On Monday, students were given a rubric, a calendar, a book and possible ideas for their research projects. They are welcome to come up with their own as well. Most of the work will be done at home, however, we will spend the first part of next week working on this project in class. Students are encouraged to come to class prepared to conduct independent research. Presentations will have a duration of 3 to 4 minutes and will take place on March 31st. Please make sure your child completes their obligations on a timely manner.
Investigation 5: Salt of the Earth
What is the salt tolerance of several common farm crops? To find the answer to this question students set up a controlled experiment to test the effect of salinity of four kinds of plants. They planted four containers with identical arrays of seeds: barley, corn, peas, and radishes. They watered each container with a different concentration of salt water. In order to make sense of this investigations students needed to apply the concepts/objectives learned through our units:
- Environment is everything that surrounds and influences an organism.
- An environmental factor is one part of an environment. It can be living and non-living.
- Optimum is the condition or degree of an environmental factor that is most favorable to growth, development, and reproduction of an organism.
- Organism have ranges of tolerance for environmental factors.
Our aquatic environments investigation has come to an end. Your child is allowed to take their fish home. If they are authorized by a parent, bring a container on Monday so they can bring their fish home.
History & Geography
In history and geography we started our lapbooks about ” The Westward Expansion before the Civil War”. We began by learning about Daniel Boone and his contributions to Westward expansion. In our lapbooks we traced the U.S., made a wilderness journal, made a vocabulary pocket, and added a wilderness trail patch. In our Wilderness journal we were able to add our first entry, which was a letter written from the perspective of Daniel Boone. We pretended that Daniel Boone explored the land that Spanish With Sarah is built on. The students were given a lot of free creativity to decide the time period when Daniel Boone is exploring as well as who the letter is addressed too. Ms. Ivary read us a book about Daniel Boone and Westward Expansion, and that’s where we found our vocabulary words.We also had a quick vocabulary quiz at the end of the week, ask your student to define or use any of our vocabulary words in a sentence. We have had so much fun!
Vocabulary Words: blaze, commerce, frontier, Wilderness Trail, Cumberland Gap
Written/Edited by Riley and Bailey in collaboration with Ms. Ivary
Math
This week we focused on finding the area, the base, and height of a triangle. We began with in class discussion about what we already knew about triangles. We went over the rules of finding the area of a triangle. Ask your student what they are! We went out to the hall and did a fun activity with triangles. We had to find the area, base, vertex and height of the large triangles, you may have seen them in the hallway this week. We presented our findings for the triangles to each other in preparation for our area of a triangle test. On Friday we had our area of a triangle test and we will continue to work with angles next week. We went over our corrected homework about finding the height of a triangle. We will begin correcting our own math homework so that we can correct any mistakes and clarify any confusing points. We had a very FUN week!!!
Written/Edited by Riley and Bailey in collaboration with Ms. Ivary
English Spelling/ Vocabulary
This week for spelling we played BAM!. Because this was a review week for spelling, all 5 spelling lists were thrown into a bag. Then one-by-one we pulled out a word and had a classmate read us the word, if we were correctly able to spell the word we kept the card. The student with the most cards at the end of the month will win a prize! If we pulled a SWIPE card we were able to swipe a card from another student as long as we can spell the word on the card. If we pulled a BAM! card we had to pull a card from the BAM! bag and spell it. Words in the BAM! bag are from the next unit and so the students have not worked with them yet. If they could spell the word correctly they could keep both the BAM! card and the word card giving them double points! If not they must return all their cards to the bag. We will also have a quick 10 word spelling quiz on Monday, the quiz can have any of the words from the 5 lists on the review packet. In vocabulary this week we made little flash cards that go in our Vocabulary pocket in our Westward Expansion Lapbooks. On each flashcard we were able to choose whether to write the exact definition, an example sentence, or a drawing; which ever helped us remember the definition of the word the best.
Written/Edited by Madi in collaboration with Ms. Ivary
Art
The 4th and 5th graders continued working on their paintedpaper landscape collages. They cut out shapes from their painted papers and pieced them together to make very colorful, textured landscapes. We’ll finish up this project next week.
Music
Cowboy songs were this week’s topic. We listened to YouTube versions of The William Tell Overture (Lone Ranger), “Back in the Saddle Again,” (Gene Autry) and “Happy Trails” (Roy Rogers and Dale Evans) and learned “Git Along, Little Doggies” and “The Old Chisholm Trail.