January 3-6th

Dear Parents,

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas Break! Thank you all for your generous and kind gifts, cards, and warm wishes! I feel so grateful to have you parents and to have your students in my class this year! I can’t believe it is already January! This year has gone by so quickly!

Here is what we are doing in class this week:

Reading: This week we will be talking about point of view again, specifically in articles that are persuasive. We will also start reviewing for the DRA. We will review summaries, fluently reading, and we will be reviewing our goals we made after the last DRA. We will start DRA testing next week. Our spelling is list #15 with compound words. Students should be spending 20 minutes studying their words this week. They should also be reading 20 minutes a night and filling out their reading logs.

Math: This week we will be continuing our Equivalent Fractions Unit. We will focus on comparing fractions and ordering fractions by finding equivalent fractions. Our test on this will be next week. In Target Time we will review multi-step word problems.

Writing: This week we are going back to our Author Report. Students should finish typing their written report this week. Then we will start working on our posters. Students should bring a poster to school ASAP. If they cannot get one, I am more than happy to get one for them, they just won’t be able to pick their color! Students have a sheet with instructions for what they need on their poster. I will also post this on my blog in case students loose it. Basically, students will make a flip book and we will put the information from their written report in it. We will put this on the poster. Then students will need pictures of interesting facts, places related to the author, and a picture of the author on the poster. These will be printed off and glued to the poster with labels. We want to make sure that the posters turn out nice, so students will NOT write directly on the poster. Next week we will start presenting our reports. The Author Report is due on Friday January 13^th, so students should be finished with their written report and poster by then and ready to present by or before then.

Science: Our rock unit is now over and we will go over the rock tests this week. Our next unit is all about fossils. We will start by discussing what the class already knows about fossils and what they hope to learn. Specifically, we will start learning about impression fossils. We will also start learning a fossil song.

Social Studies: This week in social studies we will be talking about us! We will discuss things about us that are similar and different. We will also discuss where our ancestors came from. This will lead us to talking about the different people and cultural groups that have come to Utah. We will hopefully also be able to finish and grade our County Tests from before the break!

This week’s homework:

Read 20 mins each day and fill out a pink reading log

Spelling #15– 20 minutes of study and list signed by parent

Lesson 7.4-P139, 7.5-P141, 7.6-P143

*Math, reading, and spelling are due on Friday

Thanks!

Mrs. Wheatley