Week of September 17

We've enjoyed another fun week together.  Today we met Charlie Roscoe, who told us all about our Ugandan pen-pals from St Bakhita school. This is a part of our Responsible and Involved Citizen life role outcome.  Our students have always enjoyed receiving and writing letters with them.

In language arts and reading this week we set up our new Reader's Notebooks. We had some fun learning about personification. We took notes and looked for personification in our own books.  We also read and talked about our Friday Poem of the Week, "Backpack."  Afterwards we imagined what our backpacks would say to us if they could talk and a few of us even wrote some imaginative poems about our own backpacks.

Thank you so much for helping your child with his or her favorite book timeline at home.  We look forward to seeing them on Tuesday.

In math this week we continued our investigation of perimeter and area and also learned about the text features in our student reference book. This will help students be resourceful when they need to find information or get help.  Mr. Gross came in and introduced a new kind of challenge called Skyscraper.  Next week we will learn about Sudoku.

In science we began investigating what magnets can do and made some surprise discoveries about materials that we thought were magnetic but aren't.  We finished up our work learning about the brain with a Bill Nye video.  Bill! Bill! Bill!  The big message is that we can make our brain grow through experiences and practice, practice, practice.

Here are this week's secret words for finding out what your child did at school:  :-)

Tell me about:

• oneword.com
• paragraph writing
• backpack poem
• Mr. Roscoe
• Prodigy
• magnetic or not? brass? aluminum?
• skyscrapers 
• area/perimeter