Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News
for the week of May 15, 2017
Due Dates / Upcoming Events:
Monday, May 22 - weekly reading logs are due
Tuesday, May 23 - Home Link due
Wednesday, May 24 - McF’s have P.E. (sneakers)
Thursday, May 25 - math journal pages due
Friday, May 26 - states quiz / SpellingCity / Home Link due
Monday, May 29 - Memorial Day - no school
Tuesday, May 30 - weekly reading logs are due
Wednesday, May 31 - full day
General News and Announcements
Be Part of the BAND! ~ A note from Mrs. Cummings
In music class this week, students will be watching videos that demonstrate all of the instruments in the band. Some students may immediately connect to the sound of a certain instrument while others may like a variety. Some students may be inspired by a family member or older friend. This is all fine! I encourage you to watch the video again with your child and talk about the different sounds and why your child likes it. Next week, I will visit the classes again to answer students' questions. I will also be providing parents with specific information about the band program here at school, the enrollment process, and how to obtain an instrument.
I encourage you to visit my Beginner Band 2017-18 webpage, where I will be posting this information, videos, and more. Here is a link for your convenience:
Sincerely,
Sarah Cummings
Academic Updates:
Reading Workshop
Our chapter book mentor text for the social issues unit is Just Juice by Karen Hesse, and we started it this week. We are organizing pages in our reading notebooks to keep track of characters, vocabulary, and questions we are wondering about as we read. We will grow ideas as we did in our character unit, citing details from the text to support our ideas (a la literary essay!), and I’ll incorporate new teaching points, bringing comprehension much deeper. I’ll also use this book to continue to teach some figurative language that we’ll use in our new writing unit, poetry!
Writing Workshop
And we started our final writing unit this week as well. The kids are diving into poetry with excitement and positive attitudes. (Yay, MIW teachers, for sending us kids who love to write poetry!) We read a poem by Don Graves titled, “Lost in a Book.” It’s about his experience reading Lost on a Mountain in Maine. We wrote all over our copies of the poem, noting the sophisticated connections between Don G. and Don F. (super insights!), the use of stanzas, the use of punctuation, how the writer shows the passing of time… Gold star comment by Zach: “BOTH of their fathers disappear!” and by Owen Pie.: “Both boys ‘trudge on’: the boy in the book keeps walking, and the narrator of the poem keeps reading!” (see photo of Emma’s work below)
Don’t be surprised if your child comes home humming “The Cat in the Cradle” (yeah, that one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etundhQa724). Today was the first installment of Rock’n’Roll Friday, a special day each week during our poetry unit when we study songs as poems.
Math
This week students worked hard on solving multi-step number stories involving units of weight (pounds and ounces). They also got an introduction to adding, subtracting and multiplying decimals as they solved consumer related number stories. Real life math at its finest!
Theme
In science this week students conducted an experiment which asked the question: How does the surface area of a container affect the rate of evaporation? Students measured water contents to the nearest milliliter and charted the data. They also worked on creating a poster that shows how the water cycle works.
On Friday some students took their third states quiz. The next goal is to know all 50 states for the quiz on May 26th. Thanks for all the support you have given your child with studying the states.
No comments:
Post a Comment