Weekly Reminders 1/9/12

Rockhopper Weekly Reminders
January 9-January 13

happy new year!

Mark Your Calendars:
Tuesday, Jan. 10: Math Olympiads
Tuesday, Jan. 10: Class pictures
Thursday, Jan 12: Rooms 20/21 Chabot Space and Science Center Field Trip
Friday, Jan. 13: 4th grade Ch. 19/20 Decimals test
Monday, Jan. 16: MLK Jr. Day (NO SCHOOL)


Welcome back to a new year! We hope you had a relaxing and enjoyable break. We enjoyed our holiday, but it’s great to return to school, work, and interact with the terrific students that make up our village!

Parent Volunteer Opportunities:
Our classes really need a Friday copy parent! We need someone who can come in each Friday and copy the materials for the following week. If you are free on Friday afternoons for an hour or so and are able to help us out with this, please contact either Mr. Roels or Miss Scourkes as soon as possible.

Miss Scourkes also needs a person to stuff Room 20’s Thursday folders on Thursdays. Parents from room 20 or 21 may volunteer! Please contact Miss Scourkes if you are interested!




Curriculum Flash!

Language Arts:
We’ve begun reading Dear Mr. Henshaw, and we’re beginning to understand the setting of the story and the circumstances of our main character’s life. As we read this week, we’ll be working on vocabulary critical to the story, we’ll use the text to find examples of sentence variety for grammar mini-lessons, and we’ll be responding in writing to meaningful questions about our character’s motives, reactions, and feelings. Finally, we are practicing the writing genre of business letters to create a fictional request letter (based on a situation in our novel’s story), and in the near future we’ll create a letter to an author (the foundation of the Dear Mr. Henshaw novel.)

Math
4th grade: Students are completing our work with decimals this week! We will practice rounding for the purpose of estimating sums and differences with decimal numbers to begin the week, and we’ll have experience using word problems to develop good mathematical reasoning for decimal computation. We have a test on Thursday to show our understanding of fraction and decimal concepts. Since the two methods of representing parts of a whole are so closely linked, students will have two days of class review time and activities to help clarify concepts prior to the test.

5th grade: We continue our fraction unit with an emphasis on understanding the relationships between fractional numbers. We are using both geoboards and pattern blocks to strengthen our understanding of equivalency. Today, students created pattern block designs containing fractions, used iPads to photograph their designs and wrote justifications as to why their designs contained the specified fraction. Later this week we will be comparing, adding and subtracting fractions in all forms.

Science:
In Rooms 20 & 21, we are working on Investigation 3 in Mixtures and Solutions: “Fizz Quiz.” This is a great hands-on segment that emphasizes students’ exposure to reactants and products in chemical reactions, introduction to atomic models and the chemical equations used to represent chemical reactions, and experience measuring the volumes of solids and liquids. Part 1- “Chemical Reactions” and Part 2- “Reaction Products” will be our principal topics this week. We will also be spending Thursday on our field trip to Chabot Space and Science Center for an early introduction to our final science unit of the year, Solid Earth.

Social Studies:
We continue to study “European Explorers”. Currently we’re learning how the invention of the printing press, the demand for eastern goods, the development of navigational tools, and the early writings of Marco Polo and King Henry the Navigator all affected how Christopher Columbus thought about the world, and in turn, influenced his decisions about exploration.

Name that State!
The first successful parachute jump from a moving plane occurred in this state.
The longest river in the United States flows through this state.
The ice-cream cone was invented at the 1904 World's Fair in this state.
This state's motto is the "Show Me State."
Mark Twain, the author of Tom Sawyer, was born in this state.
Which state is it?