Update From Ms. Luria

Update from Ms. Luria

Dear Families,

April Dates

Thursday 24th - All Run for the Arts money is due
Friday 25th - Rough draft of cook book page is due
April 30th - Jefferson Dancers field trip - $2 - Volunteer

May Dates

Friday 2nd - Field trip of Whole Foods for our 5th IB unit
Friday 2nd - Final draft of cook book page due

Friday 9th - Jet boat field trip

Thursday 22nd - Global Experience Night

June Dates
Friday 13th - New last day of school year

We have had a busy week. Students enjoyed a visit from Mr. Lizard and learned all about different animals. This inspired many wonderful poems. Here are a few. (No python actually come to school!) 

There once was a very big python

that ate kids up for lunch

Mr. Lizard brought him in

and . . . 

the kids were gone!

"munch, munch, munch"

Crawling tarantula

so hairy and scary

twitching her spiky hairs

crawling tarantula

so hairy and scary

big for a spider

but much small than bears

For our IB unit students got to sample both Greek food and French food. If you could give a short presentation and some samples of food (restaurant cooked or store bought) we would love to learn about more types of food! Please email me to set that up.

In non-fiction reading we read all about video games and how they are made to encourage people to want to play them more! We also talked about how stores and other places use those same techniques. We had some fascinating conversations as a class.  

In fiction reading students are either reading and discussing poetry or finishing up their novels. Students wrote all sorts of fascinating poems. I'll be posting some of them soon.

We also are reading out loud the book Frozen. To continue with our theme of comparing different sources of information or comparing texts, we are studying the similarities and differences between the book at the movie. We have read the first 3 chapters of the book and viewed about 5 minutes of scenes to compare them. Students were very engaged and noticed that you had to listen very closely to find the differences! 

In math, we are exploring the distributive property. This continues to be a big challenge for most people in the class! Most students, though, were able to do some long division by the end of this week. The method is probably a bit different than the one you learned in school. We are learning the Partial Quotient Method, which is different from the standard long division method. Please watch this 2 minute video if you get a chance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NtxVF5bfqs 

Here is a picture showing the distributive property of multiplication: 

Here is a picture of the partial quotient method:

In spelling, we continue to work on our spelling rules, dictations and high frequency words. This week we learned that when a word ends in a CY and you want to make it plural, you add an ES, which turns into IES.

Play             Not a CY              Plays

Try               Yes a CY             Tries
Finally, please check out some of the student writing on the blog.  Your kids would love to share with you some of their writing and read some feedback too! 

Have a wonderful week,
Sacha