March 6, 2017

Parents,

We are coming to the end of the third quarter of the school year. Current events are due this week on March 9th.

Math
In class we are beginning the chapter about perimeter and area. We have used a variety of tools to learn these concepts and we will continue to use hands on techniques to enhance understanding. This week we are learning how to find the measurement of an unknown side in order to find the total perimeter of a shape. By the end of the week we will be moving on to learning how to find the area of a composite shape. 

Science/Social Studies
We completed our science unit about Matter and I am pleased with the outcome of our assessment. We will be moving on to our Social Studies unit about Economics. We have begun learning about goods, services, producers, and consumers. We will begin talking about economic incentives this week. Please don't forget current events are due Thursday, March 9th.

ELA
We have just completed a unit about theme. We used poetry as the genre we were studying and used a variety of different poems to identify theme and metaphors. We previously studied the strategy of compare and contrast using informational text and we are going to go back to the strategy of compare and contrast using the genre of Fairy Tales. We will start using a variety of different fairy tale versions of The Three Little Pigs. The following week we are going to look at a variety of different stories by the same author and compare and contrast those texts. 

Writing
The class has been working on a research project with biographies. Each student chose a biography to read and then used this text to complete a graphic organizer for their notes. These notes were used to complete different sections of a biography lapbook including a timeline, different time periods of each person's life, a question they would ask and information about the researcher. The students then used this information to complete a multi paragraph writing about the person they researched. Next, we will be working on an opinion writing. The rubric that will be used to grade this writing is modeled after the rubric used to grade the writing portion of the AIR test.