Rockhopper Weekly Reminders
November 5th-9th, 2012


Mark Your Calendars:
•Wednesday, November 7th: Field Trip -“Time Machine” play in Sunnyvale
•Wednesday, November 7th: Barnes & Noble Night- the store on Stevens Creek (Rockhopper teachers will be reading from 6:00-7:00 p.m.)
•Monday, November 12th: Veteran’s Day - NO SCHOOL
•Friday, November 16th: Reading contract due!
•Friday, November 16th: End of 1st trimester

Volunteer Opportunities Still Available:
1. Copy parent
2. Thursday folder stuffer
If you are interested in either of these jobs, please contact your family room teacher!

Curriculum Flash!
Language Arts
It’s Election Week in the Rockhopper Village here at Portal! After a great deal of study about the election history and process, this term’s candidates and the issues at hand, Rockhoppers will be casting their votes on Tuesday with the rest of the nation! Students will visit the “polls” according to their “precincts,” be checked off class rosters, privately submit their ballots and proudly sport their “I Voted” stickers. Our centers this week are dedicated to celebrating the culmination of the campaigns along with the continued active reading and summarizing of Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Math
4th grade: Our work this week is all about relationships- number relationships! We’re working with arrays to fully comprehend the relationship between multiplication and division operations, we’re breaking down expressions into smaller factors, we’re learning the multiplication properties that deepen our understanding of what is actually happening in certain situations, and we’re finishing off the week with some dramatic artistic representations of multiple factor equations. It’s going to be lively!

5th grade:
This week students will plot points on a coordinate plane using the function tables. They will use positive and negative numbers and make shapes using all four quadrants. Later in the week, we will begin lessons in integers, finding their properties, plotting them on a number line, and doing operations using manipulatives.

Social Studies:
Students have been using teamwork and collaboration in social studies to learn about the following tribes: Cahuilla, Chumash, Hupa, Miwok, Mojave, and Yurok. Each group researched facts about their tribe in detail and became a “tribal expert.” This week, representatives from all six tribes will meet in small groups to participate in a jigsaw activity, which entails sharing and teaching others about their particular tribe.

Science:
All three science teachers are focused on completing our Solid Earth unit through Investigation Four- “Take It for Granite” during the next two weeks. This unit has so many great hands-on experiments that it is often difficult to complete every single one! We’ll also be using some combination of the various forms of assessments available (Responses, I-Checks, and Post Test) to get an accurate picture of our students’ understanding of the unit. Finally, classroom participation as reflected in their science notebook work is also evaluated to determine student performance in Science.

CA Trivia:
Which U.S. Air Force base is located in the Mojave Desert?