Thursday, October 12th

Reminders and Announcements

• Picture Day is tomorrow.  Our pictures will be taken at 12:20
• Friday, October 20th is a Teacher Development Day.  There is no school for students.
• Remind your student to practice their math facts regularly.  Several students are working on personal goals to master their math facts.  Does your child have their facts memorized?  If not, what are they doing nightly to make progress to memorization?

Math 

Focus Standards:

• Recognize that in a multi-digit number, a digit in one place represents 10 times as much as it represents in the place to its right and 1/10 of what it represents in the place to its left.
• Read, write, and compare decimals to thousandths.
• Read and write decimals to thousandths using base-ten numerals, number names, and expanded form, e.g., 347.392 = 3 × 100 + 4 × 10 + 7 × 1 + 3 × (1/10) + 9 × (1/100) + 2 × (1/1000).

The link below from Khan Academy has practice and videos for all of the focus standards in our current math unit.  Feel free to explore with your student if he/she is struggling with these concepts.  When you click on a topic you will see practice problems.  In the practice, there is a link for hints or videos very similar to TenMarks.

Khan Academy and Decimals

Writing

We have started our rough draft for the personal narrative that we would like to publish.  I am in the process of meeting with each student to determine the "heart" of their story (the message or theme they want to share with their readers).  Our lessons will focus on how to develop a personal narrative that reads like a story and engages the reader by bringing them into the story.  You can take a look at your student's work by asking them to show you their working document.  At this point, we are NOT deleting anything.  While we may choose to start over, further down the document, as part of the revision process, I want students to keep all writing to refer back to for good parts or essential ideas.

Can your child share the heart of their story with you?

Reading 

Focus Standards:

• Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.

We will learn strategies to determine the main idea or message of the text and how to quote specific text to support our conclusions.  

Are you looking to engage your student in discussion about their reading but do not know where to start.  Try some of the questions from the link below.  Remember to ask for specific events/details from the text to check your child's understanding.

Open Ended Literary Questions

Science/S.S.

We will work on and revise our abstract art piece to represent the distribution of water on earth in the beginning of the week.  Later, we will start looking at Native American Culture and what role water played in the lives of different tribes.