Weekly Update: January 17 - January 20

Announcements:​

• Scholastic Book Orders: New Scholastic Book fliers went home yesterday in Thursday folders. It's important to keep your child reading to build stamina, fluency, accuracy and comprehension. You can place your child's book order online using our class's code NP79X Link to order: clubs.scholastic.com/  I'll place the order at the end of the month (Jan. 31st).
• Become a PTA Member: Our school needs parents like you to sign up for PTA. Critical learning tools, field trips, and resources are paid for by our wonderful PTA, but that means we need you!  Please, become a PTA member today. England PTA website
• Home Access Center: Please, check weekly to stay up to date on your child's academic progress. Link to Home Access Center.  Continue to discuss with your child the importance of listening to directions, staying focused on school work and doing his/her personal best on all assignments. Remember, if a student earns below a 70% on any assignment or test, the student can make corrections to earn a possible passing grade (70%) per school district policy. 

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​Upcoming Events:​​​​.​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​

• Jan 23 - End of the Bluebonnet Reading Program 2022 - Voting for best bluebonnet book
• Jan 27 - Reading Unit Test "Poetry and Nonfiction Text comparison" 
• Jan 27 - Writing: Final draft of 2 poems due. 
• Feb 2 - Economics Fair Project - Information sent home in Thursday folders
• Feb 3 - Math Unit Test "Place Value" for Swyers and Lilleboe students
• Feb 3 - Last day to read 20 bluebonnet books and compete in Battle of the Bluebonnets
• Feb 8 - Science Unit Test "Weather, Soil and Earth's Forces - Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Landslides"
• Feb 9 - Economics Fair Project idea must be approved by Mrs. Lilleboe (last day to get approval)

What are we learning?  
Writing: We have written multiple poems in this poetry unit: a free verse poem on something that brings us joy, a poem focusing on emotion and creating stanzas, "Wait I Can Wait" poem which focuses on repetition and personification, and a poem with imagery and sensory words. We will continue to revise our poems with poetic language, appropriate line breaks and choosing specific words that create imagery. 

Reading:  Our current unit is Reading Poetry.  Students will be able to: 

• The learner will create mental images and make inferences using text evidence to support their understanding while reading and writing responses to a variety of poems. (3.6DF, 3.7BC)
• The learner will describe how the poetic language in poems (imagery, literal and figurative language such as simile, and sound devices such as onomatopoeia) creates imagery for the reader.  (3.9B, 3.10D)
• The learner will read a variety of poems and explain how the rhyme scheme, sound devices, and structural elements contribute to the meaning. (3.9B, 3.10D)
• The learner will compose poems using genre characteristics and revise drafts to improve word choice by adding, deleting, combining, or rearranging ideas for coherence and clarity. (3.11C, 3.12A, 3.10D)

​Math: 

• ​Swyers and Lilleboe Students: We are currently in our Place Value & Rounding unit.​
  • ​In this unit students will extend their understanding of place value to 100,000. As numbers get larger, the ability to model them concretely becomes increasingly challenging.
  • The goal is for students to generalize the structure of the place value system to understand that every time a new place is added to the left, it is composed of 10 units of the immediately preceding place value unit. So in this case, 1 hundred thousand is composed of 10 ten thousands and 1 ten thousand is composed of 10 thousands. 
  • TEK 3.2A compose and decompose numbers up to 100,000 as a sum of so many ten thousands, so many thousands, so many hundreds, so many tens, and so many ones using objects, pictorial models, and numbers, including expanded notation as appropriate; – R RC1
  • ​TEK 3.2B describe the mathematical relationships found in the base-10 place value system through the hundred thousands place; – S RC1
  • TEK 3.2C represent a number on a number line as being between two consecutive multiples of 10; 100; 1,000; or 10,000 and use words to describe relative size of numbers in order to round whole numbers; and – S RC1

• Bae/Jones/McKenzie students: Math unit - Geometry. Use my "math links" and Splash Learn to help with these concepts. In this unit students will:
  • ​Identify attributes of all quadrilaterals (squares, rectangles, rhombus, trapezoids, parallelograms)
  • Identify attributes of 3 types of triangles
  • Determine the perimeter of a 2D shape
  • Determine the area of a 2D shape
  • Describe the differences between prisms and pyramids​​

Science: We have started our next unit "Weather, Soils and Earth's Forces". This week we wrapped up the "weather" portion of this unit with a quiz and a writing response. Next week, we will begin our study of Earth's forces (volcanoes, landslides and earthquakes) and how these are rapid changes that take place on the Earth's surface. 

Social Studies: We will learn about how humans adapt to their living environment depending on where they live (cold region, hot desert area, on an island, etc) and begin our economics (financial literacy) unit as well.  We also spent some time learning more about civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. The economics (financial literacy) unit will stretch into March as we prepare for our Economics Fair on March 8th.