Tuesday, November 12, 2013

The Jungle Journal for the Week of 11/12/13

Class Needs
Our class is in need of an electric pencil sharpener.  We would greatly appreciate a donation!


Readers’ Workshop
This week we are revisiting “Thought Jots”.  As students read, they have been taught to record their thinking on the yellow post-its they received in class.  Our focus this week will be analyzing our thoughts to determine what is worthy of a “Thought Jot”.  Your child should have a small stack of post-its in the front of the book they are reading.  These post-its should be used to record their thinking during their 20-30 minutes of nightly reading.  Ask your child what thinking is worthy of a “Thought Jot”.
Our second Reading BINGO response for the second nine weeks is due this Thursday, November 14th.


Writers’ Workshop
This week we will continue to draft our Harris Burdick narratives.  We have studied dialogue and paragraph rules and will work on building suspense this week.  Your child is welcome to bring their Writer’s Notebook home to share their progress.


Skills
Students should study and complete one of the homework options for spelling list 8.  Our quiz will be Friday. The quiz will also cover our skills sheet.  This week’s focus is adjectives.  Our daily skills sheet (in their ROAR folder) will serve as their study guide.


Social Studies
We will continue learning about citizenship.  Students will not have a quiz on Friday, due to the shortened week.  We will spend our class time reading a play that depicts a group of kids trying to work for the common good.  When they learn their soccer field may be replaced by a new building, they brainstorm ideas to save the soccer field.


Math
We will have two quizzes in math this week, as we continue our study of multiplication. Wednesday's quiz will be moved to Thursday this week, due to the shortened week.  It will cover our in-class work with arrays, or rectangular multiplication models.  Students will be learning to recognize smaller arrays inside a larger array.  We will practice skip counting our way to the product two ways (using either dimension).  For example, to find 7x3=21, students could count by 7 three times or by 3 seven times.  To prepare for the quiz, students should study their yellow sheets "Finding the Number of Squares in an Array.”
Our second quiz is a timed fact fluency quiz on the 5s and 10s.  Students will have three and a half minutes to solve as many of the problems as they can.  They should review their fluency homework sheets, review their multiplication charts, and play the "Snapping Skipcount" game to prepare.


Science

Our study of energy is underway.  Students will have a quiz on Friday.  Students should study their review sheets from lesson one, as well as the Energy:  Causing Motion and Creating Change charts in their notebooks.  We will explore more of the basic forms of energy as we work to build and Energy House.  Students can earn monkey moolah by bringing in small pictures (printed, clipped, or drawn) of objects that can fill the house.  Items will be added to the house if students can explain how they cause motion and/or create change, in addition to the type of energy they exhibit.  We will take our study of the basic forms of energy to the next level by taking a look at potential and kinetic energy in our rollercoaster lab.  Ask your child about their rollercoaster design!

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