Plans Week of February 2, 2015

A fun energizer for students!

Highlights from Last Week:

•  Students are wrapping up their first research report on Colonial America. We learned strategies for writing strong introductions and conclusions, as well as how to avoid informal language.
• We conducted a fun experiment that simulated earth's water cycle. We also received a new suspect in the stolen weather data case --Debbie Drizzle. Also, we watched a Bill Nye episode on "Extreme Weather," and now we know how tornados and lightning are created.
• In math on Friday, we got caught up in a pattern between bases and exponents that we noticed from the homework. Since the teachers were dying to figure it out, we let the rest of the class try too. Sage W. figured out the rule: find the square root of a base and double its exponent, and the solution will be the same. So 9^2 = 3^4. Bravo Sage!
• Friday ended with a pep rally for the Patriots. Students debated earlier in the day about the pros and cons of idolizing sports teams. They could clearly see two powerful sides to the debate.

Here is the general plan for this week:

Special:
The after school program is hosting The Freelance Players performance of "Mother Goose, Inc." which features our very own Sam, Mikey, Nathan, and Kaela. Come check it out at 4:00pm.

Report cards go out Tuesday, February 3rd.

There will be an early release on Wednesday, February 4th for teacher professional development. We'll be learning about the PARCC test.

Estimation Week is this week. We have two challenges outside of our classroom. On Tuesday, we'll circulate the school taking other classes' estimation challenges.

All School Meeting will be on Friday, February 6th at 8:40am.

Reading: 

• Begin our new unit on reading Memoirs. Students will learn what memoirs are and why authors write memoirs. (We didn't get to start this last week.)

Writing and Social Studies:

• How to properly cite sources for our research.
• Conference with another student to get feedback.
• We will finish publishing our research papers.

Math: 

• Parenthesis in number sentences and order of operations (didn't get to this last week).
• Creating line plots from fractional data.
• Solving estimation week challenges!

Science:

• Finish learning about Extreme Weather.
• Practice answering previous MCAS questions on weather.
• Solve the weather mystery for Mr. Michael McGee.

Thanks for reading!