Hi, and believe it or not, we have finished the first week of the 2nd marking period! New progress reports will come home on Monday! Look for a print out of the current scores and any missing work. I have received three permission slips back with two of them offering to chaperone for the canoe trip in the spring. Thanks to those who got this in already, the due date is November 30th. If you did not get a conference note from me yet, please call me and let me know or e-mail me of this fact. For those who cannot make the times available, I will call you to do the conference at another time or over the phone. Report cards come home on Monday! Please look them over and let me know of any questions you have at conference time. Also, please sign the envelopes and return them to me for future report cards. There will be a survey given to parents, please take time fill this out and return them to me at conferences. I look forward to seeing many of you again next week, and others for the first time. Coming up on December 20th, we will be having the students go through an Ellis Island Simulation and we need volunteers to help work as customs agents, interviewers, nurses/ physicians, etc. Students will go through all of the areas early immigrants had to go through to get into our country from Ellis Island. The medical exam will consist of students drawing a card to see if they have a preexisting disease in which they would have to solve some puzzles to get out of quarantine, they will have customs agents check their passports and papers, their applications for citizenship, and proctor a citizenship test. The sheet for volunteers will go home next Thursday, November 15th. Also, on December 21st, in place of the holiday party, we will be partnering up with Mr. Patrick Scott's and Ms. Krafft classes to do a Cultural Foods Party. Here, students will be asked to create a festive heritage dish that represents a country their ancestors are from. If you cannot trace the ancestry to another country but to another part of the United States, you can do a regional cultural dish as well. These dishes will be sampled by the students, a lot like samples are given out at Costco or Sam's Club. I will send a note explaining this more next Thursday as well. There will be no newsletter, spelling test, or vocab test next week. There will however still be a reading log. That's all for the general updates, here's more on the subjects:
Science News
The students this week unravelled their sedimentary rock samples they made last Friday and what a success! In many cases they could see the three layers of sedimentary rock they created. Students also looked at real samples of igneous and metamorphic rocks and wrote a compare and contrast of them. Finally, the students created their own igneous crystals, through an igneous rock demonstration. These will go home next week some time. Next week, we will be investigating metamorphic rock and creating them through a simulation. Following these three types of rocks, we will be looking at fossils and creating some, and learning about minerals.
S. Studies News
The students began Unit 2 with an investigation of the geographic regions of North America. Next Wednesday or Thursday, they will have a test on chapter 3 on North America's Geography and move into the next chapter about the United States.
Writing News
Students have completed their second drafts of their personal narratives and will be doing their final drafts on computers next week. Please check with your child if he/ she has his/ hers done. If not, please get them done this weekend.
Reading News
We kept on working with text to text connections this week, where we created thinking maps displaying our connections and then transferred them to a paper. Next week, we will be working on text to world connections.
Math News
This week we worked on integers, which are any number on a number line. We learned that zero is neither a positive or negative integer, and that the absolute value of an integer is the total number of spaces it is from zero on a number line. Finally, students compared and ordered integers. Next week, we will be looking at adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing positive and negative integers.
Have a wonderful holiday weekend and enjoy the last days of mild weather! Go Irish! Beat BC!
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