May 6-10 Reminders

Rockhopper Weekly Reminders

May 6- May 10

Mark Your Calendars:

• Wednesday, May 8th:  Gold Rush Essay (rough draft) due
• Wednesday, May 8th: 5th grade Geometry Test - Unit 8
• Monday, May 13th:  Gold Rush Essay (final draft) due
• Tuesday, May 14th:  Lunch on the Lawn
• Thursday, May 16th:  Wax Museum Speech due
• Thursday, May 23rd:  Sacramento Field Trip
• Friday, May 24th:  Learning Day (No School)
• Wednesday, May 29th:  Open House 7-7:45pm for Rockhoppers!

Thank you to those parents who have offered to volunteer and assist us in some way with our fine arts performance, “Gold Dust or Bust!”  If you haven’t returned your form to us, we would appreciate it if you could send it along with your student by tomorrow, Tuesday, May 7.  We can then begin to organize our great group of volunteers for the performance on June 6th!

Curriculum Flash!

Language Arts

Bridge to Terabithia remains the central topic in all our work.  We are doing vocabulary work, character analysis, and a variety of response work to the situations in the text.  We’ll be reading through Chapter 5 this week as a village. Our writer’s workshop time is being divided between informational report work in Social Studies and a new Keynote project in Science- both are great applications of our writing skills and organizational abilities.

Math:

4th grade:

Students are having a great time creating their own Perimeter Park; we are seeing a lot of creative designs!  This project will allow us as teachers to see if our students understand customary and metric units of measurement and the calculation of perimeter. We’ll begin statistics and graphing this week, and our classes will be doing data collection, single and double bar graph creation, and statistical analysis of data (mean, median, mode, and range.) We’ll even question each other about graphical data- what can you learn from this graph?

5th grade:

This week students will have fun as they deepen their understanding of geometry and data concepts through a series of performance tasks.  Two of the activities include creating a model while comparing surface area to volume and completing a line plot based on data gathered from their classmates.  On Wednesday, there will be a geometry test on Unit 8, the measurement and classification of geometric figures.

Social Studies:  

Our Gold Rush Wax Museum projects are under way; the final presentation will be shared with you at Open House!  The project has many different components (research essay, informational board, costume, speech, props) and a series of due dates to help students manage their time and accomplish tasks piece by piece.  Time in class will be given to work on the project, but students will also need to complete some parts for homework.

Science:

This week students will be asked to work on a technology project using a presentation application to demonstrate their understanding of the interdependence of organisms in a variety of ecosystems. They will make slides to show pollination and food webs. Simultaneously, we will also read interesting articles from the science textbook that speak of animal and bird migration, range of tolerance, and the various ecosystems within California.

CA Trivia:

What wealthy Californians were moved by the death of their son to found a university?