Weekly Reminders 4/22/13

Rockhopper Weekly Reminders
April 22-April 26


Mark Your Calendars:
Friday, April 26th: Crazy Sock Day!
April 29th - May 3rd: STAR Testing Week
Thursday, May 23rd: Sacramento Field Trip
Friday, May 24th: Learning Day (No School)
Wednesday, May 29th: Open House


Curriculum Flash!
Language Arts

Rooms 20&21:
All our classes will be starting our last core literature book, Bridge to Terabithia, this week. As a Rockhopper Village, we’ve planned activities to begin our unit that will allow our students to think carefully about the ideas introduced in the novel. The first few chapters are on our reading list for this week.

For our two classrooms, we begin our preparations for our fine arts performance entitled “Gold Dust or Bust!” this week. Our actors will be rehearsing their songs, lines, and start their group planning for choreography. The goal this week will be to become comfortable with song melodies and lyrics.

Math:
4th grade:
As we welcome our math students back, we shift our attention gradually from geometry to measurement concepts. We will review customary and metric measurement terms, practice accurate measurement with appropriate tools, and compare customary and metric measurements of particular items. Toward the end of the week, we will review the geometry terminology we studied prior to the break, and our classes will take a short Geometry Quiz on Friday.

5th grade:
This week we will review some previously learned concepts in geometry and continue to teach the fifth grade standards that involve finding the area of parallelograms, triangles, and complex figures, along with finding the sums of the interior angles of both triangles and quadrilaterals. In addition, we’ll review classifying polygons and solve multi-step problems. Finally, we’ll review of Unit 8. Whew! What a busy first week back!

Social Studies:
Students will wrap up the projects they’ve been working on before break which will serve as closure to our unit on Mexican California. We will segway into The Gold Rush by reading and taking notes.

Science:
Our Environments unit will resume this week for all classes. Investigations 1 & 2 are largely complete at this point, and all classes will be examining aquatic environments and the effect of various organisms on the health of the environment. Depending on the class progress on these investigations, science teachers will assess understanding with applicable I-Checks for the investigations. Each teacher will be scheduling these assessments with their groups.

CA Trivia:
The “Big Four” in CA history refers to whom?