McFarland-Mayberry-Begley Bulletin

for the week of February 23, 2015

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Recess

Please remind your child to come prepared to go outside for recess every day!  Many students are coming to school saying that they didn’t think we would go outside, and they end up outdoors without boots or a hat.  We have the kids go out for fresh air whenever the temps are above 10 degrees.  Please make sure your child is prepared.  Thank you!

Reading Workshop

This past week we started building background knowledge about slavery in America.  We are working to use nonfiction texts to help support our understanding of historical fiction books.  The time periods that we will focus on as a class during the historical fiction unit are: slavery, immigration, WWII/Holocaust, and civil rights, though individual students will be reading from a variety of time periods.  We’ll mix nonfiction, historical fiction, and web-based sources throughout this unit. 

Writing Workshop

Last week we focused on the differences between retelling and using storytelling language.  We did a community circle to brainstorm action words and feeling words.  This week, we will use a wordless picture book, The Farmer and the Clown, to practice storytelling language, like professional authors!

Math

This week in math students continued to work on partial quotients division. This is probably some of the hardest work we will do this year and having fact fluency with multiplication skills is very important. For students who aren’t quite there yet with their facts I am encouraging them to use a multiplication chart to help with the problem solving work. 

     We also worked on interpreting remainders. There are times with a division story problem when it makes sense to ignore the remainder, show the remainder as a decimal or a fraction, or round up the answer to the nearest whole number. Students need to be mindful of the question in the problem in order to interpret what should be done with the remainder. Much of this work focuses on applying math concepts to real life math problems.

Spelling

This week students learned that y at the end of a word can sound like long e or long i.  We also reviewed spelling rules for adding suffixes.  Students practiced this while adding -er and -est to adjectives to make comparative and superlative forms.

Theme

This week we wrapped up our magnetism and electricity unit.  Students spent two days using their study guide to make a study tool (flash cards, memory game, or Jeopardy) to bring home).  We played Jeopardy as a class and discussed the types of questions on the quiz.  Friday students took the quiz.  Next week we will start a social studies unit focusing on map skills and landforms.

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, March 2nd - Reading logs due / Winter gear & sneakers for P.E.

Tuesday, March 3rd - Study link due

Wednesday, March 4th - Early Release

Thursday, March 5th - Spelling due / recorders

Friday, March 6th - Study link due

Mrs. Belmore is teaching a snowshoeing unit with PE classes.  For PE on Mondays, each student needs to have a winter jacket, snow pants, boots, gloves or mittens and a hat.  They do not need to bring their own snowshoes.

We had a successful Iditarod on Thursday!  Channel 6 was there, as well as Mrs. MacArthur and Mr. Porter.  Here is a link to the story that aired:  http://www.wcsh6.com/story/news/local/2015/02/27/students-hold-their-own-iditarod/24132805/

Hope you had a terrific weekend!

Dena