Classroom Update - Week of March 25th

Updates & Reminders:

• This week, the students will be participating in a kickball tournament during specials, every day, except for Wednesday. It is important that the students wears sneakers on those days, so they will be ready to play.

• Track Out Day is Friday, March 29th.

• Fourth Grade Beach Field Trip is scheduled for April 26th. Reminders and packing checklists will be resent closer to the date.

• Mark your calendar - MES 5th Annual Stampede 5K is coming soon! This is a time for community, family, fitness and fun… and warmer weather! Join us for the 5th Annual Stampede 5K on Sunday, May 5 from 2-5pm. The proceeds from this fun family and community event will go directly to the MES PTA to fund educational resources, programs, and school improvements.

E.L. Education:

This week, the students will be finishing their Loyalist broadsides. This is their final writing piece that they will write this quarter and they will be working on planning, drafting, editing and revising and then taking this piece to their final copy. On Wednesday, the students will take a reading benchmark. This formative assessment will cover fiction, nonfiction, and poetry passages and a great variety of question types. This information will be shared at the beginning of next quarter. They will also take their final EL assessment on Thursday, where they will be asked to identify prepositional phrases and distinguish between frequently confused words. On Friday, the students will start to prepare for their fourth module, by learning about the Women's Suffrage movement to help them build background knowledge. Our next E.L. text is The Hope Chest by Karen Schwabach.

How to Help Your Child at Home:

• Discuss words that writers use when sharing their opinion on a topic and words that they use to persuade.

• Have your child share with you what the Loyalists and Patriots believed and what they were trying to convince other colonists to believe.

• Have your child share with you their broadside's focus statement and the reasons and evidence that they will provide for support.

• Encourage your child to keep up with their nightly reading homework via Google Classroom.

Math:

This week in math, the students will be working on solving two step word problems. They will be working in collaborative groups to break apart and discuss the different components of the questions. They will work on utilizing strategies such as highlighting key words and numbers and identifying key words and determining their meanings and how they affect the word problems. When we track back in the students will be working on identifying and classifying geometric shapes.

Questions to Ask Your Child at Home:

With your child's homework, ask your child the following problems to get them to think more critically about the steps that they took to solve the problems:

• Walk me through the steps on how you solved this problem.

• What strategy did you use?

• Is there another way that you could have solved this problem?

• How could you check your work to ensure that it is correct?

Science:

This week, the students are reviewing for the unit assessment, which will be given Wednesday, March 27. At home, students should study their notes to prepare for the test.

How to Help Your Child at Home:

• Encourage your child to visit the links for landforms on the "Learning Links" page above. Also, students can use the resources at Discovery Education to begin a "Landforms" content folder (practiced with Ms. Minton).