Monday, October 28, 2013

The Jungle Journal for the Week of 10/28/13

This Thursday at 10:00 our school will be participating in a drill to practice evacuating the school to our designated off site safe area.  Our evacuation site is Chets Creek Church and students will walk from the school to their building, be seated in designated areas for a short period of time, and then walk back to the school.  The drill should take no longer than one hour from start to finish.  During this time we will not be able to check students in or out and there will be no one at the school to answer the phone.  Please make arrangements accordingly.  Thank you for supporting us as we work to ensure that your children are safe.

Readers’ Workshop
Our work empathizing with characters is taking a slight shift this week.  Previously, our focus was “becoming” the character, creating mental movies and connecting emotionally to characters.  While this is, and will always be important, we are now working to grow ideas and theories.  Our work begins by recognizing that a character’s actions are a window into the sort of person he or she is.  With our work in Second Step, we have developed our ‘social intelligence’ that basically means the ability to read people well, to glean what they are thinking and feeling.  We are applying these skills to the characters in our books.
Students will receive their new BINGO board and response deadlines this week.  We will work to review Reading BINGO expectations and introduce new response options this week.

Writers’ Workshop
This week, we will continue our use of the ‘story mountain’ template to organize and plan out  our story’s structure.  This tool will help us to introduce the characters and setting, slowly build suspense toward a climax, and then work towards a resolution.  Ask your child how their story planning is going.  Students are welcome to bring their writing journal home to share their progress.

Reminders
Please send in bags of individually packaged candy for our Fall Carnival!  Also, we are still looking for parent volunteers for our carnival booth, the Soccer Kick.  Please let us know if you are available to work a shift!  We appreciate your support!

Skills
There will be no spelling or skills test this week. 

Math
We are continuing our unit about multiplication and division, called Equal Groups.  One way your child has explored multiplication is by skip counting.  You can continue to build on this work by asking questions such as the following:  What number would we land on if we counted by 4’s and everyone in our family said one number?  How many people would have counted by 3’s to reach 27?  Students are developing an understanding that we use multiplication to combine a number of equal groups and that we use division to split a quantity into equal groups.  Ask your child the following question: There are 4 spiders.   If each spider has 8 legs, how many legs are there? 
They will have a Math quiz on things that come in groups on Tuesday, October 29th.  They can review workbook pages 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 to prepare.

Science
We are concluding our study of matter and how it can be described.  Students should know that properties of matter, such as mass, volume, length, and temperature can be measured and compared using tools.  Matter is anything that takes up space and has mass.  Properties of matter include shape, size, color, texture, and hardness.  Three states of matter are solid, liquid, and gas.  Matter changes states through heating and cooling.  Water melts, freezes, boils, evaporates, and condenses.  The students should review workbook pages 99-103, 105-107, and 109-113 to prepare for the end of unit assessment on Thursday, October 31st.

Social Studies

There will be no Social Studies blue sheet or quiz this week.  

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