Classroom Update - Week of August 5th

Upcoming Events / Reminders:

• If you have not signed up for the Remind App, please do so. I will be using this site to communicate and share classroom happenings regularly, so I really hope everyone takes the opportunity to join.

• ​To join send a text message to the number 81010 and type @mrsbrackes in the message space.

• If you are having trouble with this, let me know I can send a message to your cell phone number.

• Walker registration forms are available on the MES website (click here) for the 2019-2020 school year. If you live in the designated walk area and would like to apply, please complete the form and submit it to the front office.

• Goodberry’s Spirit Night: Celebrate the beginning of the school year with some frozen custard! Bring your friends and family on Tuesday, August 6th, from 11:00 am to 10:00 pm to Goodberry's Custard (2325 Davis Dr. Cary, NC 27519). Mention you are there to support MES and our school gets a portion of the sale!

• Tuesday, August 13th is Track 4's Curriculum Night from 6:00-8:00PM in our classroom (#410). Hope to see everyone there!

• Labor Day is Monday, September 2nd. There will be no school that day.

• Track Out Day for Quarter One is Friday, September 27th.

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 and the students will take their first math assessment on Thursday, August 8th tomorrow in class. On Friday, 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. Some examples of multiplicative comparison problems are below:

• Sarah has twice as many markers as her friend Rachel. If Rachel has 9 markers, how many markers does Sarah have?

• Ryan's lunch cost $6 and Stuart's lunch cost 3 times as much as Ryan's. How much did Stuart's lunch cost?

• This video on LearnZillion is also helpful.

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 their social studies unit, which focuses on the history of North Carolina. They will continue to focus on the first people of our state, the Native Americans and how their lives changed after the arrival of the Europeans. They will also begin to learn more about each region, (Mountain, Piedmont, and Coastal Plains) how it was settled, and the impact that it had on the development of the community.

How to Help Your Child at Home:

Discuss with your child the following questions:

• How were various Native American groups changed after the arrival of the Europeans?

• Tell me about the disappearance of the colony of Roanoke.

• What do you think happened to these colonists?

• Why did England want to establish colonies in America?