Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of January 29, 2018

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, February 5: weekly reading logs due

Tuesday, February 6: Home Link is due

Wednesday, February 7: early release

Thursday, February 8: math journal pages are due

Friday, February 9: Home Link is due/ SpellingCity is due

Monday, February 12: weekly logs are due

General News and Announcements

Global Play Day

On Wednesday, February 7th, GMS students in grades 4-5 will be participating in an event called  Global School Play Day . Last year over 283,000 students participated in this day of unstructured play across the globe.  Students are encouraged to bring games and toys from home.  Our only restriction is no electronic devices.  This is a day (well, half-day) for students to enjoy the fun and creativity that naturally occurs when children engage in unstructured play. This idea grew from a TEDX talk by Peter Gray titled The Decline of Play.

Valentines Day

Students are welcome and encouraged to bring in Valentines for each child in the class.  I’ll send home a class list on Monday.  In 4th grade, most students do bring them in.  All students must bring in a container to collect and bring home the Valentines they receive that day.  Containers can range from an elaborate, bejeweled masterpiece, to reusing last year’s container, to a plastic Hannaford bag. Containers and cards should be brought in to school on February 14th.

Academic Updates

Writing Workshop

This week we have been focusing on cause and effect.  Students are writing five cause and effect sentences, following student-designed criteria, on an area of personal expertise.

Reading Workshop

Today, we shared Main Idea Bags!  Students set out their bags, and three others wrote their guesses for the main idea.  Each student shared the contents of her/his bag, shared the guesses, and then announced the actual main idea.  It was fun!  Students were scored on their understanding of the main idea concepts based on both their own ideas and their guesses of others’.  There is still some confusion about the difference between a topic (soccer) and a main idea (Soccer is fun!), so we’ll continue to address that.

Math

This week students worked on multi-step number stories and did a lot of review work for the end of unit assessment. Unit 4 progress packets will be sent home by the end of next week. On Monday students will jump into unit 5 which is the second of three fraction units this year.

Theme

Due to the iReady assessments this curriculum area took a backseat this week.