Week 6, First Nine Weeks

Reading: Tomorrow, the students will complete an assessment showing me how much they know about the different genres.  The rest of the week will be spent talking about theme and another signpost.  Theme can often be tricky for kids.  Often, they want to generalize the text and say what it is about rather than the lesson that is learned.  As you are watching TV shows, movies, or reading books together this week, try to get your child to think about the theme.  Some questions we'll be discussing in the classroom to help guide us are "What did the main character learn?" or "How did the main character grow or change?"  The signpost we'll be looking at is called "Words of the Wiser."  This signpost alerts us to pay attention when a character is talking to another character, often an older and wiser one.  Quite often, the other character will share a piece of advice that can easily be transferred into a theme.  (Think back to some of your favorite stories and I think you'll quickly notice this: Gandolf in Lord of the Rings, Dumbledore in Harry Potter, Aslan in Narnia, Mufasa in the Lion King, the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella and many more!)

Language: We are continuing to focus on possessive nouns, ensuring that students can tell plural and singular possessive nouns apart as well as use them properly.

Math: I hope to finish rounding early this week and then our focus will shift to addition and subtraction.  Some homework your child will start off with will be solving addition problems in multiple ways.  Please do not help him/her with this as they can do it, but if you've got the time, let them tell you about how they solved the problems and which ways they found most efficient and why.

Alabama History: We have not gotten as much covered the last few lessons as I had planned because of the incredible questions your children have about prehistoric Alabama: how people came to be here, what life was like for those people, the animals that lived at that time, etc.  I love hearing their many, many questions, but unfortunately I do not know the answer to them alll.  I hope they are asking you and/or perhaps doing some research on their own!  We will continue talking about early Alabamians this week and discussing what life was like for Paleo, Archaic, Woodland and Mississipian Indians.

Science: On Friday, the children discovered that sound is caused by vibration.  Check out how they figured it out:

This week we will continue to look at that as well as how to change the pitch of an instrument/object.