Newsletter Mayberry-McFarland Weekly News

for the week of April 2, 2018

Due Dates / Upcoming Events:

Monday, April 9: weekly reading logs due

Tuesday, April 10: Home Link due / McFarlands have P.E. (sneakers, please)

Wednesday, April 11: full day

Thursday, April 12: math journal pages due / No SpellingCity this week

Friday, April 13- Sunday, April 22: April Vacation: no school

Monday, April 23 : weekly logs are due (8 days)

Special Announcements:

Thank you joining us over the past two weeks for Parent Teacher Conferences.  It’s a great way for us to share what’s happening in our classrooms, your child’s progress, goals, and things you’d like us to focus on for the last quarter of the school year.  

Stones of Kindness

In anticipation of the Habitat for Humanity walk students painted stones with positive messages to leave along the trail for both the school walk and the community walk. We have heard from several participants this week who found our rocks and sent us messages of thanks.

Academic Updates

Writing Workshop

Lots was accomplished this week!  Students put their heads down and dug into writing three full supporting idea paragraphs for their literary essays.  Thank you for your support at home -- including not helping too much!  Students have been busy finding evidence to support their ideas and then telling why that part is important enough to include in the essay (What does it show about their ideas?).  They’re working on writing sentences that make sense (this is harder than it sounds), using transitions, correctly punctuating quotes from the text, and writing strong ending sentences.  

    As promised, we have already started attacking our Run-On Sentence Epidemic.  We revised and edited part of a literary essay written by a former student. I’ve started a chart on the wall listing all the kinds of “problems” we fixed on his essay, so that students can use it as a sort of to-do list for ways they should be revising their own writing.  Next week: ending sentences and conclusion paragraphs, some advanced work with figurative language, and a mini-lesson just for those who need it about how to use punctuation when a quote from the story involves dialogue.

Reading Workshop

This week we joined reading partnerships to form book clubs.  Each reader chose a section of the assigned book to share, and clubs followed the “Save the Last Word for Me” format to run their book clubs (see chart below).  Three out of five clubs have met so far, and the others will meet on Monday. Round two next week!

Save the Last Word for Me:

Book Club Meeting Directions

DURING THE BOOK CLUB MEETING

Steps for the meeting:

1. Gather close together in your book club.  Bring all copies of the books.
2. One member will share a section of the text.  The member does not share at this time why s/he chose that section.
3. Next, each member will respond to that section of the text (see sentence starters below).  This is your chance to push your own thinking!
4. Once all members have responded to the first member’s section of text, that member will have The Last Word.  S/he will respond to the group’s ideas and share why s/he chose that section.  Build on to the ideas shared in the group.
5. The next member of the group will then share the section of text s/he chose.  
6. Repeat steps 2-5 until all members have shared their parts of the text.

Sentence starters to respond to a club member’s share:

• When I hear that part, I think about…
• That part is important, because…
• I learned that…
• The author is trying to show…
• That part connects to…

Math

This week students continued their work with division using the partial quotients algorithm. I have posted a tutorial on my web page for both students and parents to access at home. In addition, students learned to interpret what to do with a remainder when solving division number stories, they discovered how to convert U.S. customary units of weight: ounces, pounds and tons and how to measure degrees in an angle using a full circle protractor.

Phew, we covered a lot this week!

Theme

Our classes have started a new history unit in theme this week. In this unit our students will learn about the early colonies that founded our country in the 1600’s. We specifically focus on the lost colony of Roanoke and Jamestown. They will gain an understanding about the time period; why colonists came to our shores, challenges early settlers faced and why some colonies failed while others succeeded. We will weave in a few science related activities in this unit as we move forward.