December 7th - 11th

Important Dates:

Day 1	Monday, December 7th	RAVE Assembly  (9th Hr)  “Pie in the Face”
Day 1	Wednesday, December 9th	Staff Mtg  3:20PM
	Monday, December 14th	Donations for Giving Tree due
Day 2	Thursday, December 10th	Golden Apple Nominations due Give-A-Kid-A-Book Campaign ENDS
Day 1	Thursday, December 17th	Band Concert  LV Gym  5th @ 6PM   6th @ 7PM
Day 2	Friday, December 18th	LV TALENT SHOW/Silent Auction  BP PAC  6-8:30
	December 23-January 1	NO SCHOOL - WINTER BREAK

Lessons:

Clubhouse kiddos are always there
to lend a helping hand!

Advanced Math :

Students will continue to work on their self-paced unit.  I would like to see students continuing to put forth their best effort.  Be sure that your child has a pair of headphones/earbuds for school as this is an item they are required to have for Math.   Remember that the self-paced unit is specifically on all operations with fractions and decimals.

Science:

Students are continuing to work on Cycles of Matter, they are working on the water, carbon, and nitrogen cycle.  These are tougher concepts for the students to understand, so help them by having a conversation about it at home.

Achieve 3000:

Students are continuing to work on increasing their Lexile scores (level of informational text).  Our goal is to have all students in the 900 plus range by the end of the school year.  We will be working on continuing to increase their independent critical thinking skills while developing their reading comprehension.

Resource Language Arts:

Students will be keeping up with their grammar and spelling routine.  They will also be reading WATCHING IN THE WILD, a non-fiction story about a famous scientist, Jane Goodall. 

Resource Math:

Students will  continue Unit 3, which includes multiplying, adding, and subtracting fractions.  They are practicing skills such as reducing improper fractions, changing mixed numbers to improper fractions, and finding common denominators in order to add or subtract the fractions. Please ask your son/daughter to show you an example. Also, please continue to practice multiplication facts at home. 

Resource Writing:

Students will be sharing the narratives that they published about an insect (they chose the setting, 3 characters, problem, and solution) and will be drafting another narrative.

Language Arts:

Last week students chose a topic of their interest to write informational paragraphs about.  This will allow us to practice the various text structures we have been studying such as description, sequencing, comparison, cause/effect, and problem/solution.  For each text structure, students will create a clear graphic organizer to arrange the information before writing.  From there, students will create a solid topic sentence followed by clear sentences to explain their information also using transition words to help readers identify each text structure.  These organizers and paragraphs will be used for scoring student knowledge of applying text structure.  Besides text structure, students are expected to read 20 minutes per night and turn in an active reading log on Friday.  A MobyMax stories lesson is due by Friday as well.

Writing:

Students have started a winter memory to practice narrative writing.  Students wrote rough drafts last week.  This week we will be focusing on elaboration to add sensory details as well as showing instead of telling.

Social Studies:

Our focus this week will be on the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies.  Our new standard asks that students understand the political, religious, social, and economic differences that evolved during the colonial era.  We will use map reading skills to gain information from an atlas of US History as well as other various online and textbook resources to gather information on each colonial region.

Hard working Social Studies teams studying colonial economy using product maps...