Rockhopper Weekly Reminders
October 1st-5th, 2012
Mark Your Calendars:
• Tuesday, October 2nd- Lunch on the Lawn
• Wednesday, October 3rd - 4th grade math quiz
• Thursday, October 4th- Unit 1 Test in Social Studies
• Thursday, October 4th- Destination Imagination parent information meeting 6:30-8:00 p.m.
• October 8th-19th- Fall break/P.E.P
• Monday, October 22nd- School resumes
• October 22nd-26th- Red Ribbon Week
• Monday, 29th- Learning Day (No School)
• Tuesday, October 30th- Lunch on the Lawn @11:30 & Halloween Parade @1:00
Curriculum Flash!
Language Arts
Island of the Blue Dolphins remains our #1 topic for the week. We’ll continue reading together to cement our understanding of the story events, and we will use one of our chapter readings to begin our independent summary writing (after a couple of sessions of guided instruction in the writing genre, that is!). We will also dabble in a bit of research about the wildlife that surround the Island of the Blue Dolphins for some nonfiction reading and note-taking practice. In addition, now that we know our AR reading levels, we can be more selective about the fiction and nonfiction material we choose over the break for our Reading Contracts. Finally, our blogging schedule will be established for the year. Here are our Rockhopper class blogsite addresses:
Room 20 (Scourkes): http://rockhopperroom20.blogspot.com/
Room 21 (Roels): http://gtfroom22.blogspot.com/
Math:
4th grade: This week we delve deeper into identifying and evaluating expressions, equations, and inequalities. By the end of the week, our goal is to be able to take real world situations and describe them mathematically using either an expression, equation, or inequality to show the number relationships in the word problem. Also, our Unit One test is ready to be passed back to students. You will see that there is a STRONG emphasis on showing your thinking to fully demonstrate mathematical problem-solving. Last, we will have game rotations on Friday to reinforce skills learned during the past two weeks- this was postponed last week in order to make sure our classes had enough time to really grasp the math concepts being presented!
5th grade: We are now deriving rules and generalizations based on patterns we see. Students continue to look at a variety of patterns, complete afunction tables, and look for the relationships between numbers. They are then able to come to a generalization or “rule”. We will also introduce vocabulary so that students can effectively write about what they have discovered.
Social Studies:
Students will be taking their first unit test in social studies on Thursday, October 4th. Last week, students were given a significant amount of class time to study and prepare both individually and with their table group. On Wednesday, we will be playing Jeopardy as a final chance to review for the exam.
Science:
After beginning the week with our Investigation Two: Scratch Test I-Check today, we move on to other identifying properties of rocks. Investigation Three: Calcite Quest is this week’s main topic. We will use a safe chemical test to detect the presence of the mineral calcite in our rock samples. Students will be adding new vocabulary to their science notebooks to allow themselves to express their science thinking clearly on future response questions,I-Checks, and notebook work in our field of study.
CA Trivia:
What CA island is derived from the Spanish phrase for “The Island of the Pelicans”?
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