Hello everyone,

I hope you all had a nice weekend. It already looks like the weather is warming up today. This week we have a normal schedule. We are still celebrating March is Reading Month this week and students should be filling out the reading logs they brought home and returning it each Friday. The class that has the most logged time will win an ice cream party. They can read books, magazines, Myon.com or log time reading on Mobymax Stories. We also still have time to have guest readers. I hope you are able to sign up on the calendar in the hallway, outside of our room, to come in a share a favorite book. If you would like to read but do not have a book you would like to read, I can get a book for you to share.

Here is our weekly learning objectives:

Math: We are starting our next unit which takes us back to fractions. We are going to be converting mixed numbers into improper fractions and vice versa. We will be working on adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing these fractions. Fractions are always tricky so please be check in with them on their understanding.

Reading: We are moving into informational texts in our strategy groups. You may have noticed their non-fiction texts coming home already on Friday.

Spelling: We are looking at multisyllabic words that end in the “able” chunk. We are going to look at it as a suffix as well. As always the word list is added to Spellingcity.com for the students to practice the word chunk and the content words.

Writing: Students have finished up their “100 year old” writing prompts and we have started moving into poetry. We have been working on diamante poems which are pattern poems that require the students to use different parts of speech in a specific pattern. Ask your student to show you how to write one. We will be looking at multiple types of poems before each student makes a final booklet on their publish poems.

Science: We are continuing their study of DNA and traits. We are starting to use animal traits to see how they help animals survive in their given environment. We will be creating a DNA model this week as well.

The music concert has been moved to April 21st at 7 p.m.

The STEM meeting is March 8th at the Michael Berry Center. Students are not required to attend but I do not think it would be bad for them to hear the presented information. If you are considering or applied already for the STEM middle school, I highly recommend that you attend.

I am excited to announce that I wrote a grant for our classroom and I was selected to receive it. I will be presented the amount today and I look forward to seeing how much money I am able to bring into the classroom for class sets of materials!

I hope everyone has a great week!