Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of December 11, 2017

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, December 18: reading logs due

Tuesday, December 19: ABL: sneakers are helpful

Wednesday, December 20: FULL DAY; 4th Grade Holiday Activity Swap

Thursday, December 21: Celebration of Reading Day (see details below)

Friday, December 22: classroom clean-up / holiday movie / assembly

Tuesday, January 2: Happy New Year!  Welcome back to school!  Reading logs due (8 times for the weeks 12/18-½).

General News and Announcements

Door Decorating Project

All spaces in the ⅘ wing are participating in a door decorating contest.  Our class is working on making a scene of snow-people reading favorite books.  Each child has created a plan for her/his snow-person.  Part of the plan might include bringing in materials from home on Monday.  Please note that my directions for the kids were to ask parents’ permission to bring certain things; I am not expecting families to go out and buy fancy materials or anything, and I was clear about that with the class.  Examples of what some students have talked about are cotton balls, tissue paper, and glitter glue.  Here at school we have tons of construction paper, glue, tape, large paper… I’ll take a picture when we are done, so you can see our final creation!  Thank you to the Tebbs family for laying out the background for us!

4th Grade Holiday Activity Swap: Wednesday, December 20

Fourth-grade teachers have organized a fun afternoon of holiday-related activities.  Students will choose three sessions to attend and will rotate through those.

Celebration of Reading: Thursday, December 21

Mrs. Mayberry and Mrs. McFarland have declared this a day to celebrate reading!  We will be reading for most of the day!  Make sure to bring lots to read: chapter books, picture books, comic books, magazines, word search books, Sudoku books, newspapers, you name it!  We will read independently, we will read with partners, and we will enjoy read aloud!  

    To ensure your comfort, we invite you to bring a blanket, pillow, stuffed animal, etc.!  Please note that everything you bring in must be brought home on that day.

Winter Recess

Please make sure your child is prepared for outdoor recess every day with snow gear and boots.  Students will go out to recess every day when it is 10-degrees (taking into consideration the windchill factor), even when it’s snowing.  See below for Winter Recess Guidelines:

GMS 4-5 Winter Recess Rules

• We will keep the snow on the ground by not throwing, kicking, or tossing it.

• We will stay away from ice by leaving icicles on the building and not sliding on ice patches.
• We will avoid areas that are marked off with orange cones.
• We will stay on the pavement until the snow is packed down after a snowstorm, unless we are wearing boots.
• We will wear boots and snow pants when playing in the snow.
• We will slide on our bottoms feet first.
• We will slide one at a time and make sure the path is clear before we slide down.

Academic Updates:

Writing Workshop

Students have completed their boxes and bullets plans for their essays, and when we return from vacation, we will focus on crafting supporting idea paragraphs that include mini-stories, statistics, and info from interviews or surveys.

Reading Workshop

We have continued to work on strategies to help us read nonfiction, especially when it gets hard!  Sometimes, headings are misleading; there’s too much info in one paragraph; there are tons of statistics; there’s more than one topic, idea, or perspective…  A hybrid text is often a combination between narrative and expository -- AND, authors don’t always signal a reader that the text structure is changing!  So, we need to be on the lookout for that, because we read narrative and expository texts in different ways.  So, what’s a reader to do?  Read and REread.  Ask oneself, “What’s this part teaching?”  Talk and write to think: “Why…?  How..?”

Math

In math this week students learned to convert metric units of length (meters, centimeters and millimeters) This ties in well with our recent work around decimal values. We also reviewed skills from this current unit in anticipation of an assessment next Tuesday.

Knowing multiplication facts with relative ease is making math easier for many students. At this point students will get credit for practicing multiplication facts only for their at-home practice. Until the end of vacation I will have a site linked on my page for practicing multiplication facts. It is called Christmas Lights Match. This is a fun site where students earn lights to decorate the outside of a house by correctly answering the facts (multiplication only please). Students also learned how to play Multiplication War with dominoes this week. If you have a set of dominoes, ask your child to show you how this is played. Playing this game and using the site both count toward at-home multiplication fact practice.

Theme

This week we started a Mystery Science unit called Energizing Everything. In the first activity students learned about sources of energy: batteries, springs, food, etc... They had fun making rubber band racers and were challenged to give their racers just enough energy to make it into a sweet spot marked on the floor.

In addition, this week students learned about the famous Antarctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton. In support of their nonfiction reading unit they enjoyed the reading of Trapped By The Ice written by Michael McCurdy and watched a short documentary about one of the greatest survival stories of all time.