WEEKLY UPDATE

Families, please enjoy an update from each subject below.  I am also sending home graded work in the Friday Folder.  Please make sure this work returns to school for our student portfolio work.

READING: We have been integrating social studies geography reading into our reading time.  These reading lessons from the textbook help inspire ideas for our island work.  Students are also getting time to reading book share books and get a solid start on book shares.  Next week, we will continue with this format before starting Native American themed book clubs in October.

WRITING: Most of our writing time has been focused on our Gazetteer work for our islands.  Writing skills demonstrated in this project are basic writing mechanics, alphabetizing, and formatting.  Students also completed their I AM poems.  They look fantastic.  Several writers have had time to collect images and begin recording their poems in iMovie.

MATH: Our current math unit has been a review on addition and subtraction methods, applied to decimals too.  We will spend Friday and Monday preparing for a Tuesday assessment on this unit. Next up in math will be multiplication.

SCIENCE: We spent time observing and discussing the garden areas at Grant School.  Then groups designed an experiment to study if wind speed affects animal presence in our gardens.  These mini experiments are intended to give scientists experience with experimental design: planning variables, questions, hypothesis, etc...

SOCIAL STUDIES: We spent all our ss time on our island gazetteers this week.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading about their creative islands and viewing their interesting maps.  Today, we are introducing the travel brochure writing.  We will be writing our travel brochures and preparing for the Travel Show between now and Oct. 1.