Classroom Update - Week of August 6th

Upcoming Events / Reminders:

• The Go Play Save School Fundraiser started last week. Please return forms and books by August 24th. Thank you to the families who have participated, so far!

• Ident-a-Kid for Track 4 will be held on this Thursday, August 9th. Paperwork for this went home last Friday in Friday Folders.

• This Thursday, August 9th is Track 4's Open House from 6:00-7:30PM. Hope to see you all there!

• Friday, August 17th is an Early Release Day. School will be dismissed at 1:15PM.

• Check out the clubs on the MES webpage. There are many new ones that are being offered this year and new ones being added.

• Labor Day is Monday, September 3rd. There will be no school that day.

• Friday, September 28th is an Early Release Day. School will be dismissed at 1:15PM

• Track Out Day for Quarter One is Friday, September 28th.

E.L. Education:

This week the students will continue to read the book, Love That Dog by Sharron Creech and learn more about the characteristics of poetry (structure, rhyme/meter, imagery, and repetition) through studying a variety of different poems. The students will also be investigating what inspired Jack (the main character in Love That Dog) to write poetry by reading some of the poems that he talks about in the text (ie. "The Tiger" by William Blake, "Dog" by Valerie Worth, and "The Pasture" by Robert Frost). They will also work on making inferences as they read, writing summaries, and comparing and contrasting the similarities between poetry and prose. The students will be taking their mid-unit reading assessment on Friday.

Poetic Terms to Remember:

• Structure: how the poem is organized

• Rhyme/Meter: whether the poem rhymes and the rhythm or beat

• Imagery: words and phrases an author uses to help the reader imagine with the senses - sight, sound, taste, touch and smell

• Repetition: repeated words and phrases

• Prose: the ordinary form of written or spoken language. It has no meter, pattern or rhyme to it.

How to Help Your Child at Home:

• Read poetry aloud with your student and invite him or her to find poems or a poet that he or she particularly likes.

• Help your student practice reading aloud fluently and accurately.

• Talk to your student about the meaning of the poems he or she is reading and what inspired the poet. Encourage your student to find evidence of that inspiration in the poems.

• Have your child turn a favorite poem into prose (see definition above)

• Have your child practice summarizing a poem that they read (A summary must include the title, author, details that tell what it is about, and identify the theme with support from the text).

Math:

This week in math, the students will continue to work on graphing. They will continue to review frequency tables, line plots, and bar graphs. They will work on asking classmates their own survey questions, creating frequency tables, creating either a bar graph or line plot to match, and constructing strong questions that analyze their data. We will be reviewing for the our test on Wednesday, August 8th tomorrow in class. On Thursday, the students will be starting their second math unit that will focus on multiplicative comparisons. In multiplicative comparison problems, there are two different sets being compared. The first set contains a certain number of items. The second set contains multiple copies of the first set. Any two factors and their product can be read as a comparison.

How to Help Your Child at Home:

• Point out graphs to your child in magazines or newspapers. Have them tell you the type of graph that it is, whether it is numerical or categorical, and then ask them specific questions about the information the graph is telling you (both literal and inferential).

• Give your child meaningful data points and have them create the best graph to display the information. Have them create their own questions that could be answered by the information in that graph.

• Ask your child to solve these multiplicative comparison problems:

• ​The giraffe is 20 feet tall, the kangaroo is 5 feet tall. The giraffe is how many times taller than the kangaroo?

• I have a piece of yarn that is 7 cm tall and Jim has a piece of yarn that is 5 times as long. How long is Jim's piece of yarn?

Social Studies:

This week, the students will continue to learn about economics in North Carolina. Today they played a lemonade stand game that had them learning about supply, demand, and the importance of setting a fair price. Tomorrow, they will learn about famous entrepreneurs from North Carolina (the inventors of Krispy Kreme, Cheerwine, and Mount Olive Pickles) and the struggles and successes that they faced as they made their companies into strong businesses. They will end the week by focusing on scarcity and why it happens. The students were given a list of important economics terms today to help them study and learn for an upcoming vocabulary test that is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, August 14th. They also will be bringing home an industry homework project tomorrow. This will not be due until Wednesday, August 22nd.

How to Help Your Child at Home:

• Help them study the economics vocabulary words with them.

• Have them share with you what they learned about the entrepreneurs from North Carolina.

• Help them in conducting research on their chosen North Carolina industry.