Curriculum Update September 17-21

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and upcoming week. Please remember picture day is on Wednesday.

The lap-a-thon was a huge success. Thank you for returning the pledge envelopes.

Reading
We will continue Theme 2, Life in Many Places in Rigby. The comprehension strategy focus is asking questions. Your child should ask questions before, during and after reading which will continue to make them "think" about what they are reading. We have also been continuing to ask questions.
The vocab words are: distinguish, popular, coast, voyage and creek.

Math
We began Topic 2, number sense: addition and subtraction. The students have learned different strategies for mental math. This week, we will work on rounding, estimating sums, estimating differences, making sense of addition and subtraction equations, and reasonableness.

SS
The students began to learn about their Shawnee community. We talked about roles of different people in the community, focusing on the mayor of Shawnee. The students completed their "Where in the World is?" posters and their circle map, which focused on how their city relates to the rest of the world.

This week, we will continue to learn about rural, suburban, and urban communities. The students will create their own communities.

Science
We are continuing with our solar energy unit. This week, we learned about how earth materials absorb solar energy at different rates. In conducting our investigation, we discovered gravel heats the quickest, with sand coming in very closely. Tree bark absorbed the least solar energy.

Earth material photos:

This week, we will test the effectiveness of sun screen and create solar water heaters.

Spelling
The Rigby spelling theme will focus on word families.
List 1: tulip, slip, relay, today, began, plan, clown, frown, black, fold
List 2: battleship, fingertip, midday, highway, yesterday, mailman, quarterback, attack, withhold, blindfold
Extension List: The prefix is poly (many) polychromatic, polyclinic, polydactyl, polyglot, polygon, polygraph, polyhedron, polymorphous, polysyllabic, polytheism

Writing
We completed our beginnings for our narrative we are writing on a family vacation. The students were able to choose between a fiction or nonfiction story. We now will begin to develop our plot. They are working hard on making their story interesting by using "colorful" and no "worn out" words (nice, big, little, etc.)

The students were so excited to receive letters from their pen pals in Kentucky. This is a rural school, so it was interesting learning how so many students lived on farms and owned horses and cows. We will finish writing them back this week.

Have a fantastic weekend!