3rd Nine Weeks: Week 1

Welcome back!  I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday with your children, enjoying time together celebrating and relaxing.

Report cards will come home on Thursday, so please be on the lookout for those so that you and your child can sit down and discuss those together.

In the Tuesday Communicator this week, I will be sending home your child's AR record for the past nine weeks and his/her reading goals are on the yellow sheet (that you may keep) in the Tuesday Communicator.  Please take some time to look over both of these with your child and discuss some ideas for reading goals for the upcoming nine weeks.  We will be setting those reading goals together later in the week.

Reading - This week we are starting another classic, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.  The story is a historical fiction novel based on the Nazi occupation of Denmark in the 1940s.  It is a beautiful tale of bravery and friendship as two young girls deal with the struggles that surround them during this scary time.  We will be learning more about the history behind the story, as well as the author, looking for signposts in our reading and also learning more about text and graphic features found in nonfiction writing.  Our vocabulary words this week come from chapter 1 of the novel: hesitated, incident, sabotage, occupation, civilized, contempt, defiantly, hoodlum, and residential.

Spelling - Words this week will focus on the final long e sound found in words such as colony, chimney, prairie and injury.

Language - We will continue our study of adjectives this week as we look specifically at comparative adjectives.

Math - This week, we will be diving head first into division.  We will be looking at divisibility rules, estimating quotients and a variety of ways to solve division problems.

Science - We will be talking about space exploration this week, but specifically how it has affected our daily lives with the introduction of new technology made possible by space exploration.

Alabama History - Our focus this week is on the great state of Alabama and how we became the 22nd state in the nation.